Drugging a nation

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Ck. l(o^-oV

Tk gi|t o\

HAROLD J. OOOLIDQB

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

G^

« I

H. E. TONG SHAO-T

e of the Leaders of the Opium Reforn

Movement in China

DRUGGING A NATION

^Drugging a Nation

The Story of China
and the Opium Curse

A Personal Investigation, during an
Extended Tour, of the Present Con-
ditions of the Opium Trade in China
and Its Effects upon the Nation

By
SAMUEL MERWIN

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

London and Edinburgh

f

rUHEiC IL EEVHX COMPAKT

. »

^~" ' :

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/* : >• :\ " .^i '^^'-C-^-

>J

UN 'vS.TY
LI <^ ♦ - '^^ *"**»^

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 35 Richmond Street, W.
London: ai Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

NOTE

THESE chapters were originally published
during 1907 and 1908 in Success Maga*
sine. Though frankly journalistic in
tone, the book presents something more than the
hasty conclusions of a journalist. During its
preparation the author travelled around the world,
inquiring into the problem at first hand in China
and in England, reading all available printed mat-
ter which seemed to bear in any way on the sub-
ject, and interviewing several hundred gentlemen
who have had special opportunities to study the
problem from various standpoints. The writing
was not begun until this preliminary work was
completed and the natural conclusions had be-
come convictions in the author's mind.

CONTENTS

I. China's Predicament . ^ . 9

II. The Golden Opium Days . . 20

III. A GuMPSE Into an Opium Prov-

ince 53

IV. China's Sincerity ... 70

V. Sowing the Wind in China —

Shanghai loi

VI. Sowing the Wind in China —

Tientsin and Hongkong . .129

VII. How British Chickens Came

Home to Roost . . .154

VIII. The Position of Great Britain . 178
Appendix . • • . . 204

r

ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing pagi

H. E. ToNG Shao-i TitU

Kneading Crude Opium with Oil to Make

Round or Flat Cakeb . • • • 27

Making Round Cakes of Opium ... 27

The Opium Hulks of Shanghai . . • 50

An Opium Receiving Ship or ** Godown '' at

Shanghai • 50

The Villages were Little More than Heaps

OF Ruins . 54

At Last He Crawls Out on the Highway,
Whining, Chattering and Praying that a
Few Copper Cash be Thrown Him . . 54

Wreck and Ruin in China • . • .68

Enforcing the Edict at Shanghai • . . . 88

In AN Opium Den, Shanghai • • . .114

Opium-smoking 114

Weighing Opium in a Government Factory in

India 154

Where the Chinaman Travels, Opium Travels

TOO 172

Drugging a Nation

CHINA'S PREDICAMENT

IN September, 1906, an edict was issued
from the Imperial Court at Peking which
states China's predicament with naivete and
vigour.

** The cultivation of the poppy/' runs the edicts
in the authorized translation, '<is the greatest'
iniquity in agriculture, and the provinces of
Szechuen, Shensi, Kansu, Yunnan, Kweichow,
Shansi, and Kanghuai abound in its product,
which, in fact, is found everywhere. Now that
it is decided to abandon opium smoking within
ten years, the limiting of this cultivation should
be taken as a fundamental step • • . opium
has been in use so long by the people that nearly
three-tenths or four-tenths of them are smokers.''
" Three-tenths or four-tenths " of the r^**^^^
people, — one hundred and fifty milUofi opium-
smokers — mean three or four times the popula-

9

lo Drugging a Nation

tion of Great Britain, a good manx^tnore than
the population of the United States !

The Chinese arelnbtoriously inexact in statis-
tical matters. The officials who drew up the edict
probably wished to convey the impression that
the situation is really grave, and employed this
form of statement in order to give force to the
document. No accurate estimate of the number
of opium victims in China is obtainable ; but it is
possible to combine the impressions which have
been set down by reliable observers in different
parts of the <* Middle Kingdom/' and thus to ar-
rive at a fair, general impression of the truth.
The following, for example, from Mr. Alexander
Hosie, the commercial attache to the British
l^ation at Peking, should carry weight. He is
reporting on conditions in Szechuen Province :

" I am well within the mark when I say that
in the cities fifty per cent, of the males and twenty
per cent of the females smoke opium, and that
in the country the percentage is not less than
twenty-five for men and five per cent, for women."
There are about forty-two million people in
Szechuen Province ; and they not only raise and
consume a very great quantity of opium, they
also send about twenty thousand tons down the

China's Predicament ii

Yangtse River every year for use in other prov-
inces. The report of other travellers^ merchants,
and official investigators indicate that about all
of the richest soil in Szechuen is given over to
poppy cultivation, and that the labouring classes
show a noticeable decline of late in physique and
capacity for work.

In regard to another so-called '< opium prov-
ince/' Yunnan, we have the following statement :
''I saw practically the whole population given
over to its abuse. Theravages it is ma king in
men, women, and children are deplorable . . . .
I was quite able to realize that any one who had
seen the wild abuse of opium in Yunnan would
have a wild abhorrence of it."

TiTlater "cTiapters we shall go into the matter
more at length. Here let me add to these state-
ments merely a few typical scraps of infor-
mation, selected from a bundle of note-books full
of records of chats and interviews with travellers
of almost every nationality and of almost every
station in life. The secretary of a life insurance
company which does a considerable business up
and down the coast told me that, roughly; fifty
per cent, of the Chinese who apply for insurance
are opium-smokers. Another bit comes from a

12 Drugging a Nation

man who lived for several years in an inland city
of a quarter of a million inhabitants. The local
Anti-opium League had 750 members, he said
and he believed that about every other man in
the city was a smoker. " It is practically a case
of everybody smoking/' he concluded.

Twenty-five years ago, when the consumption
of opium in China could hardly have been more
than half what it is to-day, a British consul esti-
mated the proportion of smokers in the region
he had visited as follows : '* Labourers and small
formers, ten per cent. ; small shopkeepers, twenty
per cent; soldiers, thirty per cent. ;' merchants,
eighty per cent. ; officials and their staff, ninety
per cent; actors, prostitutes, vagrants, thieves,
ninety-five per cent" The labourers and farmers,
the real strength of China, as of every other land,
had not yet been overwhelmed — ^but they were
going under, even then. The most startling
news to-day is from these lower classes, even
from the country villages, the last to give way.
Dr. Parker, the American Methodist missionary
at Shanghai, informed me that reports to this
eiiect were coming in steadily from up country ;
and during my own journey I heard the same bad
news almost everywhere along a route which

China's Predicament 13

measured, before I left China, something more
than four thousand miles.

Perhaps the most convincing summing up of
China's predicament is found in another transla-
tion from a recent Chinese document, this time
an appeal to the throne from four vicero)rs. The
quaintness of the language does not, I think, im-
pair its effectiveness and its power as a protest :
«* Chi^ ca n never become str ong^ and, _stapd
shouMgand shoulder_with the^pawers of the
world unless she <^ get rid of theMbit pf opium-
smoking by hersubjectej^bout^^^^^ of
whom have been reduced to skeletons and look
4ialPdead.**^

This then is the curse which the imperial gov-
ernment has talked so quaintly of " abandoning."
This is the debauchery which is to be put down
by officials, ninety per cent, of whom were sup-
posed to be more or less confirmed smokers.
Such almost childlike optimism brings to mind a
certain Sunday in New York City when Theodore
Roosevelt, with the whole police force under his
orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to
mind other attempts in Europe and America,
to check and control vice and depravity— at-
tempts which have never, I think, been wholly

y

14 Drugging a Nation

successful — and one begins to understand the dis-
couraging immensity of the task which China has
undertaken. Really, to ''stop using opium"

■fa^M, — ■ ■ ! Wi n II

would mean ^ j;^!^ rr^*'^^"gine of the ag ricul-
tural plan of the empire. It would make neces-
sary an immediate solu tion of C hina's transporta-
tion problem (no other croj^is so^easy to carry

as opium) aih? an almost complete reconstruction

■"•'•■ •■ -• . . . .. „ . . „

of the imperial finances ; indeed, few observers
are so glib as to suggest offhand a substitute for
the immense opium revenue to the Chinese gov-
ernment. And nobody to accomplish all this
but those sodden officials, of whom it is safe to
guess that fifty per cent, have some sort or other
of a financial stake in the traffic !

In the minds of most of us, I think, there has
been a vague notion that the Chinese have al-
wa}rs smoked opium, that opium is in some pe-
culiar way a necessity to the Chinese constitution.
Even among those who know the extraordinary
history of this morbidly fascinating vegetable
product, who know that the India-grown British
drug was pushed and smuggled and bayoneted
into China during a century of desperate protest
and even armed resistance from these yellow
people, it has been a popular argument to assert

China's Predicament 15

that the Chinese have only themselves to blame
for the " demand " that made the trade possible.
Of this " demand/' and of how it was worked up
by Christian traders, we shall speak at some
length in later chapters. " Educational methods "
in the extending of trade can hardly be said to
have originated with the modern trust. The
curious fact is that the Chinese didn't use opium
and didn't want opium.

Your true opium-smoker stretches himself on
a divan and xiyfiS^up..ten.'Or.fi£teea .minutes, to
preparing his thin(ibl§fjii.,of .the. brown, drug.
When it has been heated and wo rke d to th e
proper consisten cy, he places it in the tiny bowl
oif his pipe, holds it over a lamp, and draws a
few whifis of the smoke deep into his lungs. It
seems, at firs^^^a^ trivial • thing ; iinieed, 4he man
who is well fed and properly housed and clothed
seems able to keep it up for a considerable time
and without appreciable ill results. The greater

difficu lty in China is, of course, that very few
opium-smokers are well fed and properly housed
and clotfied.

I heard little about th^ beautiful, dreams and-
visions which opium is su{^po86d to bring; all the
smokers with whom I talked could be roughly

l6 l^ugging a Nation

divided into t wo classes — those who smoked in
ord er to relieve pain or misery , and those miser-

able victims wl^Q smoke^ to relieve the acute
ph j^sical distress brought on by the o pium itseltZ
Probably the majority of the victims tak e it up as
a temporary relief; many begin in early child-
hood ; theSiit&Seit JKjll S^^^ the baby a whiff to

Stop its crying. It is a social vicsLOfily among
the up per classes. The most nota ble outward
effect of this indulgence is the re sulting physical
weak ness and lassitude. T h e opium rgrP^^^r nan,
not work hard lJie finds it diffiiailLto apply his
mind to a prpbl(aD...or his. body tp a tasl^. As
the habit becQme8.finnly.. fastened on him, there
is a perceptible weakening of his moral fibre ; he

shows himself unequal to emergencies which

. — ....

make any sudden demand upon him. If opium

is denied him, he will lie and steal in order to ob-
tain it.

Opium-smoking is a costly vice. A pipefull
of a moderately good native product costs more '
than a labourer can earn in a day ; consequently
the poorer classes smoke an unspeakable com-
pound based on pipe scrapings and charcoal.
Along the highroads the coolies even scrape the
grime from the packsaddles to mix with this

China's Predicament 17

dross. The derk earning from twenty-five to
fifty Mexican dollars a month will frequently
spend from ten to twenty dollars a month on
opium. The t3rpical c onfirm ed smoker is a man
who spends a considerable part of the night in
smoking himself to sleep, and all the n§yX morn-
ing in sleeping off the effects. If he is able to
work at all, it is only during the afternoon, and
even at that there will be many days when the
offiadjor merchant is incpmpetent to conduct
his affair^ Thousands of prominent men are
ruined every ygar. . .

"The Cantonese have what tiiey call " The Ten
Cannots regarding The Opium-Smoker." " He
cannot (i) give up the habit; (2) enjoy sleep;
(3) wait for his turn when sharing his pipe with
his friends ; (4) rise early ; (5) be cured if sick ;
(6) help relations in need ; (7) enjoy wealth ; (8)
plan anything ; (9) get credit even when an old
customer; (10) walk any distance/'

This is the land into which the enterprising
Christian traders introduced opium, and into
which they fed opium so persistently and forcibly
that at last a ''good market" was developed.
England did not set out to ruin China. One
finds no hint of a diabolical purpose to seduce

i8 Drugging a Nation

and destroy a wonderful old empire on the other
side of the world. The ruin worked was inciden-
tal to tihtat.fau- Eastern trad<r of which England
has be en so proud. It was the tri umph of tiiie
balance sheet Qyeic c o aM non luunanity.

And so it is to-day. British India still holds
the cream of the trade, for the Chinese grown
opium cannot compete in quality with the Indian
drug. The British IndianxQyernmrnt -tmises the
poppy in the xicb Ganges- VaI]fi}r.(more than six
hundred thousand acres of poppies they raised
there last year), manufactures it in government
factories at Patna and Ghazipur— -manufactures
four-fifths of it especially to suit the Chinese taste,
and sells it at annual government auctions in
Calcutta.

The result of this traffic is so veiy grave that
it is a difficult matter to discuss in moderate
language. To the traveller who leaves the rail-
road and steamboat lines and ventures, in spring-
less native cart or swaying mule litter, along the
sunken roads and the hills of western and north-
western China, the havoc and misery wrought
by the " white man's smoke," the " foreign dust,"
becomes unpleasantly evident. Some hint of the
meaning of it, a faint impression of the terrible

China's Predicament 19

devastation of this drug — ^let loose, as it has been,
on a backward, poverty-stricken race — is seared,
hour by hour and day by day into his brain.

A terrible drama is now being enacted in the
Far East The Chinese race is engaged in a
fight to a finish with a drug — and the odds are
on the drug.

II

THE GOLDEN OPIUM DAYS

IN the splendid, golden days of the East
India Company, the great Warren Hastings
put himself on record in these frank words :

'< Opium is a pernicious article of luxury, which
ought not to be permitted but for the purpose of
foreign commerce only." The new traffic prom-
ised to solve the Indian fiscal problem, if skill-
fully managed ; accordingly, the production and
manufacture of opium was made a government
monopoly. China, after all, was a long way off
— and Chinamen were only Chinamen. That
the East India Company might be loosing an un-
controllable monster not only on China but on
the world hardly occurred to the great Warren
Hastings — ^the British chickens might, a century
later, come home to roost in Australia and South
Africa was too remote a possibility even for
speculative inquiry.

Now trade supports us, governs us, controls

our dependencies, represents us at foreign courts,

20

The Golden Opium Days 21

carries on our wars, signs our treaties of peace.
Trade, like its symbol the dollar, is neither good
nor bad; it has no patriotism, no morals, no hu-
manity. Its logic applies with the same relent-
less force and precision to corn, cotton, rice,
wheat, human slaves, oil, votes, opium. It is the
power that drives human affairs ; and its law is
the law of the balance sheet. So long as any 1
commodity remains in the currents of trade the
law of trade must reign, the balance sheet must
balance. It is difficult to get a commodity into
these currents, but once you have got the com-
modity in, you will find it next to impossible to
get it out. There has been more than one prime
minister, I fancy, more than one secretary of
state for India, who has wished the opium ques-
tion in Jericho. It is not pleasant to answer the
moral indignation of the British empire with the
cynical statement that the India government can-
not exist without that opium revenue. Why, oh,
why, did not the great Warren Hastings develop ^
the cotton rather than the opium industry I But
the interesting fact is that he did not He
chose opium, and opium it is.

The India Government Opium Monopoly is
an import factor in this extraordinary story of a

22 Drugging a Nation

debauchery of a third of the human race by the
most nearly Christian among Christian nations.
We must understand what it is and how it works
before we can understand the narrative of that
greed, with its attendant smuggling, bribery and
bloodshed which has brought the Chinese em-
pire to its knees. In speaking of it as a <' mon-
opoly," I am not employing a cant word for
effect. I am not making a case. That is what
it is officially styled in a certain blue book on
my table which bears the title, " Statement Ex-
hibiting the Moral and Material Progress of India
during the year 1905-6," and which was ordered
by the House of Commons, to be printed, May
loth, 1907.

It is easy, with or without evidence, to charge
a great corporation or a great government with
inhuman crimes. If the charge be unjust it is
difficult for the corporation or the government to
set itself right before the people. Six truths can-
not overtake one He. That is why, in this day
of popular rule, the really irresponsible power
that makes and unmakes history lies in the hands
of the journalist. As the charge I am bringing
is so serious as to be almost unthinkable, and as
I wish to leave no loophole for the counter-charge

The Grolden Opium Days 23

that I am colouring this statement, I think I can
do no better than to lift my description of the
Opium Monopoly bodily from that rather pon-
derous blue book.

There is nothing new in this charge, nothing
new in the condition which invites it. It is
rather a commonplace old condition. Millions
of men, for more than a hundred years, have
taken it for granted, just as men once took piracy
for granted, just as men once took the African
slave-trade for granted, just as men to-day take
the highly organized traffic in unfortunate women
and girls for granted. Ask a Tory political leader
of to-day — Mr. Balfour say — for his opinion on the
opium question, and if he thinks it worth his while
to answer you at all he will probably deal shortly
with you for dragging up an absurd bit of fanati-
cism. For a century or more, about all the mis-
sionaries, and goodness knows how many other
observers, have protested against this monstrous
traffic in poison. Sixty-five years ago Lord Ash-
ley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) agitated the
question in Parliament. Fifty years ago he ob-
tained from the Law Officers of the Crown the
opinion that the opium trade was " at variance "
with the " spirit and intention " of the treaty be-

24 Drugging a Nation

tween England and China. In 1891, the House
of Commons decided by a good majority that
** the system by which the Indian opium revenue
is raised is morally indefensible." And yet, I
will venture to believe that to most of my readers,
British as well as American, the bald statement
that the British Indian government actually
manufactures opium on a huge scale in its own
factories to suit the Chinese taste comes with the
force of a shock. It is not the sort of a thing we
like to tiiink of as among the activities of an
Anglo-Saxon government. It would seem to be
government ownership with a vengeance.

Now, to get down to cases, just what this
Government Opium Monopoly is, and just how
does it work? An excerpt from the rather pon-
derous blue book will tell us. It may be dry, but
it is official and unassailable. It is also short.

" The opium revenue " — ^thus the blue book —
** is partly raised by a monopoly of the production
of the drug in Bengal and the United Provinces,
and partly by the levy of a duty on all opium
imported from native states. ... In these
two provinces, the crop is grown under the con-
trol of a government department, which arranges
the total area which is to be placed under the

The Grolden Opium Days 25

crop, with a view to the amount of opium re-
quired."

So much for the broader outline. Now for a
few of the details :

*' The cultivator of opium in these monopoly
districts receives a license, and is granted ad-
vances to enable him to prepare the land for the
crop, and he is required to deliver the whole of
the product at a fixed price to opium agents, by
whom it is dispatched to the government factories
at Patna and Ghazipur."

This money advanced to the cultivator bears
no interest. The British Indian government
lends money without interest in no other cases.
Producers of crops other than opium are obliged
to get along without free money.

When it has been manufactured, the opium
must be disposed of in one way and another ;
accordingly :

" The supply of prepared opium required for
consumption in India is made over to the Excise
Department. . . . The chests of ' provision '
opium, for export, are sold by auction at monthly
sales, which take place at Calcutta." For the
meaning of the curious term, " provision opium,"
we have only to read on a little further. ** The

26 Drugging a Nation

opium is received and prepared at the govern-
ment factories, where the out-turn for the year
included 8,774 chests of opium for the Excise
Department, about 300 pounds of various opium
alkaloids, thirty maunds of medical opium, and
51,770 chests of provision opium for the Chinese
market." There are about 140 pounds in a chest.
Fou« grains of opium, administered in one dose
to a person unaccustomed to its use, is apt to
prove fatal.

Last year the government had under poppy
cultivation 654,928 acres. And the revenue to
the treasury, including returns from auction sales,
duties, and license fees, and deducting all '* opium
expenditures," was nearly ;$22,ooo,ooo (;^4486^
562).

The best grade of opium-poppy bears a white
blossom. One sees mauve and pink tints in a
field, at blossom-time, but only the seeds from the
white flowers are replanted. The opium of com-
merce is made from the gum obtained by gash-
ing the green seed pod with a four-bladed knife.
After the first gathering, the sod is gashed a
second time, and the gum that exudes makes an
inferior quality of opium. The raw opium from
the country districts is sent down to the govern-

The Golden Opium Days 27

ment factories in earthenware jars, worked up in
mixing vats, and made into balls about six or
eight inches in diameter. The balls, after a
thorough drying oh wooden racks, are packed in
chests and sent down to the auction.

The men who buy in the opium at these
monthly auctions and afterwards dispose of it at
the Chinese ports are a curious crowd of Parsees,
Mohammedans, Hindoos, and Asiatic Jews.
Few British names appear in the opium trade to*
day. British dignity prefers not to stoop beneath
the taking in of profits ; it leaves the details of a
dirty business to dirty hands. This is as it has
been from the first The directors of the East
India Company, years and years before that
splendid corporation relinquished the actual
government of India, forbade the sending of its
specially-prepared opium direct to China, and
advised a trading station on the coast whence the
drug might find its way, '< without the company
being exposed to the disgrace of being engaged
in an illicit commerce."

So clean hands and dirty hands went into part-
nership. They are in partnership still, save that
the most nearly Christian of governments has
officially succeeded the company as party of the

28 Drugging a Nation

first part. And sixty-five tons of Indian opium
go to China every week.

As soon as the shipments of opium have
reached Hongkong and Shanghai (I am quoting
now in part from a straightforward account by
the Rev. T. G. Selby), they are broken up and
pass in the ordinary courses of trade into the
hands of retail dealers. The opium balls are
stripped of the dried leaves in which they have
been packed, torn like paste dumplings into frag-
ments, put into an iron pan filled with water and
boiled over a slow fire. Various kinds of opium
are mixed with each other, and some shops ac-
quire a reputation for their ingenious and taste-
ful blends. After the opium has been boiled to
about the consistency of, coal tar or molasses* it
is put into jars and sold for daily consumption in
quantities ranging from the fiftieth part of an
ounce to four or five ounces. " I am sorry to
say," observes Mr. Selby, "that the colonial
governments of Hongkong and Singapore, not
content with the revenue drawn from this article
by the Anglo-Indian government, have made
opium boiling a monopoly of the Crown, and a
large slice of the revenue of these two Eastern de-
pendencies is secured by selling the exclusive

The Golden Opium Days 29

rights to farm this industiy to the highest
bidder."

The most Mr. Clean Hands has been able to
say for himself is that, ** Opium is a fiscal, not a
moral question ; " or this, that " In the present
state of the revenue of India, it does not appear
advisable to abandon so important a source of
revenue." After all, China is a long way off.
So much for Mr. Clean Hands I His partner,
Dirty Hands, is more interesting. It is he who
has <* built up the trade." It is he who has car-
ried on the smuggling and the bribing and knif-
ing and shooting and all-round, strong-arm work
which has made the trade what it is. To be
sure, as we get on in this narrative we shall not
always find the distinction between Clean and
Dirty so clear as we would like. Through the
dust and smoke and red flame of all that dirty
business along << the Coast " we shall glimpse for
an instant or so, now and then, a face that looks
distressingly like the face of old Respectability
himself. I have found myself in momentary be-
wilderment when walking through the splendid
masonry-lined streets of Hongkong, when sitting
beneath the frescoed ceiling of that pinnacled
structure that houses the most nearly Christian

\

30 Drugging a Nation

of parliaments, trying to believe that this opium
drama can be real. And I have wondered, and
puzzled, until a smell like the smell of China has
come floating to the nostrils of memory ; until a
picture of want and disease and misery — of
crawling, swarming human misery unUke any-
thing which the untravelled Western mind can
conceive — ^has appeared before the eyes of
memory. I have thought of those starving thou-
sands from the famine districts creeping into
Chinkiang to die, of those gaunt, seemed faces
along the highroad that runs southwestward from
Peking to Sian-fu ; I have thought of a land that
knows no dentistry, no surgery, no hygiene, no
scientific medicine, no sanitation; of a land
where the smallpox is a lesser menace beside
the leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, that rage
simply at will, and beside famines so colossal
in their sweep, that the overtaxed West-
ern mind simply refuses to comprehend them.
And De Quincey's words have come to me:
" What was it that drove me into the habitual
use of opium? Misery — ^blank desolation' —

settled and abiding darkness ?" These

words help to clear it up. China was a wonder-
ful field, ready prepared for the ravages of opium

The Golden Opium Days 31

— ^none better. The mighty currents of trade
did the rest. The balance sheet reigned supreme
as by right. The balance sheet reigns to-day.

But we must get on with our narrative. I will
try to pass it along in the form in which it has
presented itself to me. If Clean and Dirty ap-
pear in closer and more puzzling alliance than we
like to see them, I cannot help that.

It was not easy getting opium, the commodity,
into the currents of trade. There was an obstacle.
The Chinese were not an opium-consuming race.
They did not use opium, they did not want
opium, they steadily resisted the inroads of
opium. But the rulers of the company were far-
seeing men. Tempt misery long enough and it
will take to opium. Two centuries ago when
small quantities of the drug were brought in
from Java, the Chinese government objected. In
1729 the importation was prohibited. As late as
1765, this importation, carried on by energetic
traders in spite of official resistance, had never
exceeded two hundred chests a year. But with
the advent of the company in 1773, the trade
grew. In spite of a second Chinese prohibition
in 1796, half-heartedly enforced by corrupt
mandarins, the total for 1820 was 4,000 chests.

32 Drugging a Nation

The Chinese government was faced not only
with the possibility of a race debauchery but
also with an immediate and alarming drain of
silver from the country. The balance of the
trade was against them. Either as an economic
or moral problem, the situation was grave.

The smoking of opium began in China and
is peculiar to the Chinese. The Hindoos and
Malays eat it. Complicated and wide-spread as
the smoking habit is to-day, it is a modern
custom as time runs in China. There seems to
be little doubt in the minds of those Sinologues
who have traced the opium thread back to the
I tangle of early missionary reports and imperial
\ edicts, that the habit started either in Formosa or
; on the mainland across the Straits, where malaria
^ is common. Opium had been used, generations
before, as a remedy for malaria ; and these first
smokers seem to have mixed a little opium with
their tobacco, which had been introduced by the
Portuguese in the early seventeenth century.
From this beginning, it would appear, was de-
veloped the rather elaborate outfit which the
opium-smoker of to-day considers necessary to
his pleasure.

Nothing but solid Anglo-Saxon persistence

The Golden Opium Days 33

had enabled the company to build up the trade.
Seven years after their first small adventure, or
in 1780, a depot of two small receiving hulks
was established in Lark's Bay, south of Macao.
A year later the company freighted a ship to
Canton, but finding no demand were obliged to
sell the lot of 1,600 chests at a loss to Sinqua, a
Canton ** Hong-merchant," who, not being able
to dispose of it to advantage, reshipped it The
price in that year was $SS^ (Mexican) a chest;
Sinqua had paid the company only ;$200, but
even at a bargain he found no market. Mean-
time, in the words of a *' memorandum," prepared
by Joshua Rowntree for the debate in parliament
last year, " British merchants spread the habit up
and down the coast ; opium store-ships armed as
fortresses were moored at the mouth of the
Canton River."

In 1782, the company's supercargoes at Canton
wrote to Calcutta : " The importation of opium
being strongly prohibited by the Chinese gov-
ernment, and a business altogether new to us, it
was necessary for us to take our measures (for
disposing of a cargo) with the utmost caution."

This <' business altogether new to us " was, of
course, plain smuggling. From the first it had

34 I^nigging a Nation

been necessary to arm the smuggling vesseb;
and as these grew in number the Chinese sent
out an increasing number of armed revenue junks
or cruisers. The traders usually found it pos-
sible to buy off the commanders of the revenue
junks, but as this could not be done in every
case it was inevitable that there should be en-
counters now and then, with occasional loss of
life. These affrays soon became too frequent to
be ignored.

Meantime the British government had suc-
ceeded the company in the rule of India
and the control of the far Eastern trade. As
this trade was from two- thirds to four-fifths
opium, a prohibited article, and as the whole
question of trade was complicated by the fact
that China was ignorant of the greatness and
power of the Western nations and did not care
to treat or deal with them in any event, a gov-
ernment trade agent had been sent out to Canton
to look after British interests and in general to
fill thi? position of a combined consul and un-
accredited minister. In the late 1830's this
agent, Captain Charles Elliot (successor to Lord
Napier, the first agent), found himself in the
delicate position of protecting English smugglers.

The Golden Opium Days 35

who were steadily drawing their country towards
war because the Chinese government was mak-
ing strong efforts to drive them out of business.
From what Captain Elliot has left on record it is
plain that he was having a bad time of it. In
1837, he wrote to Lord Palmerston of "the
wide-spreading public mischief" arising from
** the steady continuance of a vast, prohibited
traffic in an article of vicious luxury/' and sug-
gested that " a gradual check to our own growth
and imports would be salutary." Two years
later he wrote that "the Chinese government
have a just ground for harsh measures towards
the lawful trade, upon the plea that there
is no distinction between the right and the
wrong."

He even said : " No man entertains a deeper
detestation of the disgrace and sin of this forced
traffic ; " and, " I see little to choose between it
and piracy." But when the war cloud broke,
and responsibility for the welfare of Britain's sub-
jects and trade interests in China devolved upon
him, he compromised. " It does not consort
with my station," he wrote, " to sanction measures
of general and undistinguishing violence against
His Majesty's officers and subjects/'

36 Drugging a Nation

It will be interesting before we consider the
opium war and its immense significance in history,
to glance over the attitude of the company and
later of its successor, the government, towards
the whole miserable business. The company's
board of directors, in 1 817, had sent this dispatch
from Calcutta in answer to a question, " Were it
possible to prevent the using of the drug al-
together, except strictly for the purpose of
medicine, we would gladly do it in compassion
to mankind."

It would be pleasant to believe that the East
India Company was sincere in this ineffective if
well-phrased expression of " compassion." The
spectacle of a great corporation in any century
giving up a lucrative traflic on merely human
and moral grounds would be illuminating and
uplifting. But unfortunate business corporations
are, in their very nature, slaves of the balance
sheet, organized representatives of the mighty
laws of trade. I have already quoted enough
evidence to show that the company was not only
awake to the dangers of opium, but that it had
deliberately and painstakingly worked up the
traflic. Had there been, then, a change of heart
in the directorate? I fear not Among the

The Golden Opium Days 37

East Indian correspondence of 1830, this word
from the company's governor-general came to
light : " We are taking measures for extending
the cultivation of the poppy, with a view to a
larger increase in the supply of opium." And
in this same year, 1830, a House of Commons
committee reported that " The trade, which is
altogether contraband, has been largely extended
of late years."

6. H. M. Batten, a formal official of the Indian
Civil Service, who contributed the chapter on
opium in Sir John Strachey's work on; " India,
its Administration and Progress," has been re-
garded of late years as one of the ablest defenders
of the whole opium policy. He believes that
** The daily use of opium in moderation is not
only harmless but of positive benefit, and fre-
quently even a necessity of life." This man, see-
ing little but good in opium, doubts '' if it ever
entered into the conception of the court of di-
rectors to suppress in the interests of morality the
cultivation of the poppy."

Perhaps the most striking testimony bearing
against the policy of the company was that given
by Robert Inglis, of Canton, a partner in the
large opium-trading firm of Dent & Co., to the

^8 Drugging a Nation

Select Committee on China Trade (House of
Commons, 1840). Here it is :

Mr. Inglis.— <' I told him (Captain Elliot) that
I was sure the thing could not go on."

Mr. Gladstone. — '' How long ago have you
told him that you were sure the thing could not
go on ? "

Mr. Inglis. — " For four or five years past."

Chairman. — ^''What gave you that impres-
sion ? "

Mr. Inglis. — ** An immense quantity of opium
being forced upon the Chinese every year, and
that in its turn forcing it up the coast in our
vessels."

Chairman. — " When you use the words ' forc-
ing it upon them/ do you mean that they were
not voluntary purchasers ? "

Mr. Inglis. — '< No, but the East India Company
were increasing the quantity of opium almost
every year, without reference to the demand in
China ; that is to say, there was always an im-
mense supply of opium in China, and the com-
pany still kept increasing the quantity at lower
prices."

Three years later, just after the war. Sir George
Staunton, speaking from experience as a British

The Golden Opium Dajrs 39

official in the East, said in the House of Com-
mons, " I never denied the fact that if there had
been no opium smuggling there would have been
no war.

** Even if the opium habit had been permitted
to run its natural course, if it had not received
an extraordinary impulse from the measures
taken by the East India Company to promote its
growth, which almost quadrupled the supply, I
believe it would never have created that extra-
ordinary alarm in the Chinese authorities which
betrayed them into the adoption of a sort of coup
d' etat for its suppression."

Sir William Muir, some time lieutenant-gov-
ernor of the Northwest Provinces of India, is on
record thus : " By increasing its supply of * pro-
vision' opium, it (the Bengal government) has
repeatedly caused a glut in the Chinese market, a
collapse of prices in India, an extensive bank-
ruptcy and misery in Malwa."

The most interesting summing-up of the whole
question I have seen is from the pen of Sir Ar-
thur Cotton, who wrote after sixty years' experi-
ence in Indian affairs, protesting against ** con-
tinuing this trading upon the sins and miseries
of the greatest nation in the world in respect of

40 Drugging a Nation

population, on the ground of our needing the
money."

What was China doing to protect herself from
these aggressions ? The British merchants and
the British trade agent had by this time worked
into the good-will of the Chinese merchants and
the corrupt mandarins, and had finally established
their residence at Canton and their depot of store-
ships at Whampoa, a short journey down the
river. In 1839 there were about 20,000 chests
of opium stored in these hulks. In that same
year the Chinese emperor sent a powerful and
able official named Lin Tse-hsu from Peking to
Canton with orders to put down the traffic at any
cost. Commissioner Lin was a man of unusual
force. He perfectly understood the situation in
so far as it concerned China. He had his orders.
He knew what they meant He proposed to
put them into effect. There was only one im-
portant consideration which he seems to have
overlooked — it was that India " needed the
money." His proposal that the foreign agents
deliver up their stores of " the prohibited article "
did not meet with an immediate response. The
traders had not the slightest notion of yielding
up 20,000 chests of opium, worth, at that time.

The Golden Opium Days 41

^300 a chest. Lin's appeals to the most nearly
Christian of queens, were no more successfuL
He did not seem to understand that China was a
long way off; it was very close to him. Here is
a translation of what he had to say. To our
eyes to-day» it seems fairly intelligent, even rea*
sonable :

'« Though not making use of it one's self, to
venture on the manufacture and sale of it (opium)
and with it to seduce the simple folk of this land
is to seek one's own livelihood by the exposive
of others to death. Such acts are bitterly ab-
horrent to the nature of man and are utterly op-
posed to the ways of heaven. We would now
then concert with your * Hon. Sovereignty '
means to bring a perpetual end to this opium
traffic so hurtful to mankind, we in this land for-
bidding the use of it and you in the nations un-
der your dominion forbidding its manufacture."

Her " Hon. Sovereignty," if she ever saw this
appeal (which may be doubted), neglected to
reply. Meeting with small consideration from
the traders, as from their sovereign, Commis-
sioner Lin set about carrying out his orders.
There was an admirable thoroughness in his
methods. He surrounded the residence of the

42 Drugging a Nation

traders, Captain Elliot's among them, with an
army of howling, drum-beatihg Chinese soldiers,
and again proposed that they deliver up those
20,cxx> chests. Now, the avenues of trade do not
lead to martyrdom. Traders rarely die for their
principles — ^they prefer living for them. The
20,000 chests were delivered up, with a rapidity
that was almost haste ; and the merchants, under
the leadership of the agent, withdrew to the
doubtful shelter of their own guns, down the
river. Commissioner Lin, still with that exasper-
atingly thorough air, mixed the masses of opium
with lime and emptied it into the sea. England,
her dignity outraged, hurt at her tenderest point,
sent out ships, men and money. She seized port
after port ; bombarded and took Canton ; swept
victoriously up the Yangtse, and by blocking the
Grand Canal at Chinkiang interrupted the pro-
cession of tribute junks sailing up the Peking and
thus cut' off an important source of the Chinese
imperial revenue. This resulted in the treaty of
Nanking, in 1843, which was negotiated by the
British government by Sir Henry Pottinger.

Sir Henry, like Commissioner Lin, had his
orders. His methods, like Lin's, were admirable
in their thoroughness. He secured the following

The Golden Opium Days 43

terms from the crestfallen Chinese government :
I. There was to be a " lasting peace " between
the two nations. 2. Canton, Amoy, Foochou,
Ningpo, and Shanghai were to be open as
"treaty ports." 3. The Island of Hongkong
was to be ceded to Great Britain. 4. An in-
demnity of $21 fioofyoo was to be paid, ^6,000,000
as the value of the opium destroyed, |l3,ooo,ooo
for the destruction of the property of British
subjects, and $12,000 floo for the expenses of the
war. It was further understood that the British
were to hold the places they had seized until
these and a number of other humiliating condi-
tions were to be fulfilled. Thus was the energy
and persistence of the opium smugglers re-
warded. Thus began that partition of China
which has been going on ever since. It is diffi-
cult to be a Christian when far from home.

It is difficult to get an admission even to-day,
from a thorough-going British trader, that opium
had anything to do with the war of 1840-43.
He is likely to insist either that the war was
caused by the refusal of Chinese officials to ad-
mit English representatives on terms of equality,
or that it was caused by ** the stopping of trade."
There was, indeed, a touch of the naivdv

44 ^^^SS^^S ^ Nation

Oriental in the attitude of China. To the
Chinese official mind, China was the greatest of
nations, occupying something like five-sixths of
the huge flat disc called the worid. England,
Holland, Spain, France, Portugal, and Japan
were small islands crowded in between the edge
of China and the rim of the disc. That these
small nations should wish to trade with ''the
Middle Kingdom " and to bring tribute to the
'' Son of Heaven," was not unnatural. But that
the " Son of Heaven " must admit them whether
he liked or not, and as equals, was preposterous.
Stripping these notions of their quaint Oriental-
ism, they boiled down to the simple principle
that China recognized no law of earth or heaven
which could force her to admit foreign traders,
foreign ministers, or foreign religions if she pre-
ferred to live by herself and mind her own busi-
ness. That China has minded her own business
and does mind her own business is, I think, in-
disputable.

The notions which animated the English were
equally simple. Stripped of their quaint Occi-
dental shell of religion and respectability and
theories of personal liberty, they seem to boil
down to about this — ^that China was a great and

The Golden Opium Days 45

undeveloped market and therefore the trading
nations had a right to trade with her willy-niUy,
and any effective attempt to stop this trade was,
in some vague way, an infringement of their
rights as trading nations. In maintaining this
theory, it is necessary for us to forget that opium,
though a «' conunodity," was an admittedly
vicious and contraband commodity, to be used
** for purposes of foreign commerce only."

In providing that there should be a '' lasting
peace " between the two nations, it was probably
the idea to insure British traders against attack,
or rather to provide a technical excuse for re-
prisals in case of such attacks. But for some
reason nothing whatever was said about opium
in the treaty. Now opium was more than
ever the chief of the trade. England had
not the slightest notion of giving it up; on
the contrary, opium shipments were increased
and the smuggling was developed to an
extraordinary extent. How a ** lasting peace '*
was to be maintained while opium, the cause of
all the trouble, was still unrecognized by either
government as a legitimate commodity, while,
indeed, the Chinese, however chastened and hu-
miliated, were still making desperate if indirect

46 Dragging a Nation

efforts to keep it out of the country and the Eng-
lish were making strong efforts to get it into the
country, is a problem I leave to subtler minds.
The upshot was, of course, that the <' lasting
peace" did not last Within fifteen years there
was another war. By the second treaty (that of
Tientsin, 1858) Britain secured 4,ocx),ooo taels
of indemnity money (about $i,ooofiOo), the
opening of five more treaty ports, toleration for
the Christian religion, and the admission of
opium under a specified tariff. The Tientsin
Treaty legalized Christianity and opium. China
had defied the laws of trade, and had learned her
lesson. It had been a costly lesson — ^^24,000,000
in money, thousands of lives, the fixing on the
race of a soul-blighting vice, the loss of some of
her best seaports, more, the loss of her inde-
pendence as a nation — ^but she had learned it.
And therefore, except for a crazy outburst now
and then as the foreign grip grew tighter, she
was to submit.

But China's trouble was not over. If she was
to be debauched whether or no, must she also be
ruined financially? There were the indemnity
payments to meet, with interest ; and no way of
meeting them other than to squeeze tighter a

The Golden Opium Days 47

poverty-stricken nation which was growing more
poverty-stricken as her silver drained steadily off
to the foreigners. There was a solution to the
problem — a simple one. It was to permit the
growth of opium in China itself, supplant the
Indian trade, keep the silver at home. But China
was slow to adopt this solution. It might solve
the fiscal problem; but incidentally it might
wreck China. She sounded England on the
subject, — once, twice. There seemed to have
been some idea that England, convinced that
China had her own possibility of crowding out
the Indian drug, might, after all, give up the
trade, stop the production in India, and make the
great step unnecessary. But England could not
see it in that light. China wavered, then took
the great step. The restrictions on opium-grow-
ing were removed. This was probably a mis-
take, though opinions still differ about that. To
the men who stood responsible for a solution of
Chinese fiscal problem it doubtless seemed neces-
sary. At all events, the last barrier between
China and ruin was removed by the Chinese them-
selves. And within less than half a century after
the native growth of the poppy began, the white
and pink and mauve blossoms have spread across

48 Dnigging a Nation

the great empire^ north and south, east and west,
until to-day, in blossom-time almost every part
of every province has its white and mauve
patches. You may see them in Manchuria, on
the edge of the great desert of Gobi, within a
dozen miles of Peking ; you may see them from
the headwaters of the mighty Yangtse to its
mouth, up and down the coast for two thousand
miles, on the distant borders of Thibet

No one knows how much opium was grown
in China last year. There are estimates — official,
missionary, consular ; and they disagree by thou-
sands and tens of thousands of tons. But it is
known that where the delicate poppy is reared,
it demands and receives the best land. It thrives
in the rich river-bottoms. It has crowded out
grain and vegetables wherever it has spread, and
has thus become a contributing factor to famines.
Its product, opium, has run over China like a
black wave, leaving behind it a misery, a dark-
ness, a desolation that has struck even the Chi«
nese, even its victims, with horror. China has
passed from misery to disaster. And as if the
laws of trade had chosen to turn capriciously
from their inexorable business and wreak a grim
joke on a prostrate race, the solution, the great

The Golden Opium Days 49

step, has failed in its purpose. The trade in
Indian opium has been hurt, to be sure, but not
supplanted. It will never be supplanted until the
British government deliberately puts it down.
For the Chinese cannot raise opium which com-
petes in quality with the Indian drug. Indian
opium is in steady demand for the purpose of
mixing with Chinese opium. No duties can keep
it out; duties simply increase the cost to the
Chinese consumer, simply ruin him a bit more
rapidly. So authoritative an expert as Sir Rob-
ert Hart, director of the Chinese imperial cus-
toms, had hoped that the great step would prove
effective. In " These from the Land of Sinim "
he has expressed his hope :

''Your legalized opium has been a cure in
every province it penetrates, and your refusal to
limit or decrease the import has forced us to
attempt a dangerous remedy — legalized native
opium — not because we approve of it, but to
compete with and drive out the foreign drug;
and it is expelling it, and when we have only
the native production to deal with, and thus have
the business in our own hands, we hope to stop
the habit in our own way."

The great step has failed. Indian opium has

50 Drugging a Nation

not been expelled. For the Chinese to put
down the native drug without stopping the
import is impossible as well as useless. The
Chinese seem determined, in one way or an-
other, to put down both. Once, again, after a
weary century of struggle, they have approached
the British government. Once again the British
government has been driven from the Scylla of
healthy Anglo-Saxon moral indignation to the
Charybdis behind that illuminating phrase —
*' India needs the money." Twenty million
dollars is a good deal of money. The balance
sheet reigns ; and the balance sheet is an exact-
ing ruler, even if it has triumphed over common
decency, over common morality, over common
humanity.

Will you ride with me (by rickshaw) along the
International Bund at Shanghai — beyond the
German Club and the Hongkong Bank — over
the little bridge that leads to Frenchtown — past
a half mile of warehouses and chanting coolies
and big yellow Hankow steamers — until we turn
out on the French Bund ? It is a raw, cloudy,
March morning; the vendors of queer edibles

AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR "GODOWN"

AT SHANGHAI

The Imported Indian Opium is Stored in These Ships Until it

Passes the Chinese Imperial Customs

THE OPIUM HULKS OF SHANGHAI
"They Symbolize China's Degredation"

r

The Golden Opium Days 51

who line the curbing find it warmer to keep
their hands inside their quilted sleeves.

It is a lively day on the river. Admiral
Brownson's fleet of white cruisers lie at anchor
in midstream. A lead-gray British cruiser swings
below them, an anachronistic Chinese gunboat
lower still. Big black merchantmen fill in the
view — a P. and O. ship is taking on coal — a
two-hundred-ton junk with red sails moves by.
Nearer at hand, from the stone quay outward,
the river front is crowded close with sampans
and junkSy rows on rows of them, each with its
round little house of yellow matting, each with
its swarm of brown children, each with its own
pungent contribution to the all-pervasive odour.
Gaze out through the forests of masts, if you
please, and you will see two old hulks, roofed with
what looks suspiciously like shingles, at anchor
beyond. They might be ancient men-of-war^
pensioned oflf to honourable decay. You can
see the square outline of what once were port-
holes, boarded up now. The carved, wooden
figure-heads at the prow of each are chipped and
blackened with age and weather. What are
they and why do they lie here in mid-channel,
where commerce surges about them ?

52 Drugging a Nation

These are the opium hulks of Shanghai. In
them is stored the opium which the government
of British India has grown and manufactured for
consumption in China. They symbolize China's
degradation.

Ill

A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE

THE opium provinces of China — ^that is,
the provinces which have been most
nearly completely ruined by opium —
lie well back in the interior. They cover,
roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as
wide, say about one-third the area of the United
States; and they support, after a fashion, a /
population of about 160,000,000. There had
been plenty of evidence obtainable at Shanghai,
Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the terrible
ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed
advisable to make a journey into one of these
unfortunate provinces and view the problem at
short range. The nearest and most accessible
was Shansi Province. It lies to the west and
southwest of Peking, behind the blue mountains
which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Rail-
road. There seemed to be no doubt that the
opium curse could there be seen at its worst
Everybody said so — ^legation officials, attaches^

53

54 Dnigging a Nation

merchants, missionaries. Dr. Piell, of the Lon-
don Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that
ninety per cent, of the men, women, and chil-
dren in Shansi smoke opium. He called in one
of his native medical assistants, who happened
to be a Shansi man, and the assistant observed,
with a smile, that ninety per cent, seemed pretty
low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi's
favour was that the railroads were pushing rapidly
through to T'ai i uan-fu, the capital (and one of
the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked
up an interpreter at the Grand Hotel des Wagon-
litSy and went out there.

The new Shansi railroad was not completed
through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the provincial capital,
and it was necessary to journey for several da)«
by cart and mule-litter. While this sort of
travelling is not the most comfortable in the
world, it has the advantage of bringing one close
to the life that swarms along the highroad, and
of making it easier to gather facts and impres-
sions.

Every hour or so, as the cart crawls slowly
along, you come upon a dusty gray village nest-
ling in a hollow or clinging to the hillside. And
nearly every village is a little more than a heap

THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN

HEAPS OF RUINS

These Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly

Well-to-do Opium Smokers

AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY,

WHINING, CHATTERING AND PRAYING THAT

A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province ^^

of ruins. I was prepared to find ruins, but not to
such an extent. When I first drew John, the
interpreter's, attention to them, he said, " Too
much years." As an explanation this was not
satisfactory, because many of the ruined buildings
were comparatively new — certainly, too new to
fall to pieces. At the second village John made
another guess at the cause of such complete
disaster. " Poor — ^too poor," he said, and then
traced it back to the last famine, about which,
he found, the peasants were still talking.
" Whole lot o' mens die," he explained. It was
later on that I got at the main contributing cause
of the wreck and ruin which one finds almost
ever3rwhere in Shansi Province, after I had
picked up, through John and his cook, the road-
side gossip of many days during two or three
hundred miles of travel, after I had talked with
missionaries of life-long experience, with physi-
cians who are devoting their lives to work among
these misery-ridden people, with merchants,
travellers, and Chinese and Manchu officials.

Before we take up in detail the ravages of
opium throughout this and other provinces, I
wish to say a word about one source of infor-
mation, which every observer of conditions in

5*6 Drugging a Nation

China finds^ sooner or later, that he is forced to
employ. Along the China coast one hears a
good deal of talk about the " missionary ques-
tion." Many of the foreign merchants abuse the
missionaries. I will confess that the '* anti-mis-
sionary " side had been so often and so forcibly
presented to me that before I got away from
the coast I unconsciously shared the prejudice.
But now, brushing aside the exceptional men on
both sides of the controversy, and ignoring for
the moment the deeper significance of it, let me
give the situation as it presented itself to me be-
fore I left China.

There are many foreign merchants who study
the language, travel extensively, and speak with
authority on things Chinese. But the typical
merchant of the treaty port, that is, the merchant
whom one hears so loudly abusing the mission-
aries, does not speak the language. He trans-
acts most of his business through his Chinese
*' Compradore," and apparently divides the chief
of his time between the club, the race-track, and
various other places of amusement. This sort
I of merchant is the kind most in evidence, and it
• is he who contributes most largely to the anti-
l missionary feeling " back home." The mission-

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 57

aries, on the other hand, almost to a man, speak,
read, and write one or more native dialects.
They live among the Chinese, and, in order to
carry on their work at all, they must be continu-
ally studying the traditions, customs, and prej-
udices of their neighbours. In almost every in-
stance the missionaries who supplied me with
information were more conservative than the
British and American diplomatic, consular, mili-
tary, and medical observers who have travelled
in the opium provinces. I have since come to
the conclusion that the missionaries are over-
conservative on the opium question, probably
because, being constantly under fire as ** fanatics "
and "enthusiasts," they unconsciously lean too
far towards the side of under-statement. The
published estimates of Dr. Du Bose, of Soochow,
president of the Anti.opium League, are much
more conservative than those of Mr. Alex Hosie,
the British commercial /7//'^3r^^ and former consul-
general. Dr. Parker, of Shanghai, the gentle-
men of the London Mission, the American
Board, and the American Presb}rterian Missions
at Peking, scores of other missionaries whom I
saw in their homes in the interior or at the mis-
sionary conference at Shanghai, and Messrs,

58 Drugging a Nation

Gaily, Robertson, and Lewis, of the International
Young Men's Christian Association, all impressed
me as men whose opinions were based on infor-
mation and not on prejudice. Dr. Morrison,
the able Peking correspondent of the London
Times, said to me when I arrived at the capital,
" You ought to talk with the missionaries." I
did talk with them, and among many diflferent
sources of information I found them worthy of
the most serious consideration.

The phrase, ** opium province," means, in
China, that an entire province (which, in extent
and in political outline, may be roughly com-
pared to one of the United States) has been
ravaged and desolated by opium. It means
that all classes, all ages, both sexes, are sodden
with the drug ; that all the richer soil, which in
such densely-populated regions, is absolutely
needed for the production of food, is given over
to the poppy ; that the manufacture of opium,
of \>ipes, of lamps, and of the various other ac-
cessories, has become a dominating industry;
that families are wrecked, that merchants lose
their acumen, and labourers their energy; that
after a period of wide-spread debauchery and ener-
vation, economic, as well as moral and physical

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 59

disaster, settles down over the entire region. The
population of these opium provinces ranges from
fifteen or twenty million to eighty million.

'<In Shansi/' I have quoted an official as
saying, " everybody smokes opium." Another
cynical observer has said that '* eleven out of ten
Shansi men are opium-smokers." In one village
an English traveller asked some natives how
many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one
replied, indicating a twelve-year-old child, ** That
boy doesn't." Still another observer, an English
scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks
the dialect as well as he speaks English, and who
travels widely through the remoter regions in
search of rare birds and animals, puts the pro-
portion of smokers as low as seventy-five per
cent, of the total population. I had some talks
with this man at Tai Yuan-fu, and later at
Tientsin, and I found his information so precise
and so interesting that I asked him one day to
dictate to a stenographer some random observa-
tions on the opium problem in Shansi. These
few paragraphs make up a very small part of
what I have heard him and others say, but they
are so grimly picturesque, and they give so ac-
curately the sense of the mass of notes and inter-

6o Drugging a Nation

views which fill my journal of the Shansi trip,
that it has seemed to me I could do no better
than to print them just as he talked them off on
that particular day at Tientsin.

<< The opium-growers always take the best
piece of land/' he said, '* in their land — the best
fertilized, and with the most water upon it They
find that it pa)rs them a great deal better than
growing wheat or anything else. Around Chao
Cheng, especially, they grow opium to a large
extent just beside the rivers, where they can get
plenty of water. The seeds are sown about
the beginning of May, and they have to be trans-
planted. It takes until about the middle of July
before the opium ripens. Just before it is ripe
men are employed to cut the seed pods, when a
white sap exudes, and this dries upon the pod
and turns brown, and in about a week after it
has been cut they come around and scrape it
off. The wages are from twenty to thirty cents
(Mexican) per day. Men and women are em-
ployed in the work. The heads of the poppy
are all cut off, when they are dried and stored
away for the seed of the next year.

" It is a very fragile crop, and until it gets to
be nine inches high it is very easily broken. The

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 61

full-grown poppy plant is from three to four feet
high. The Chao Cheng opium is considered the
best.

" In the Chao Cheng district the people have
been more or less ruined by opium. I have
heard of a family, a man and his wife, who had
only one suit of clothes between them.

*' In Taiku there is a large family by the name
of Meng, perhaps the wealthiest family in the
province of Shansi. For the past few years they
have been steadily going down, simply from the
fact that the heads of the family have become
opium-smokers. In Taiku there is a large fair
held each year, and all the old bronzes, porce- ^
lains, furniture, etc., that this family possesses
are sold Last year enough of their possessions
were on sale to stock ten or twelve small shops
at the fair.

** Another man, a rich man in Jen Tsuen, pos-
sessed a fine summer residence previous to 1900.
This residence contained several large houses and
some fine trees and shrubs, but during the last
seven years he has taken to opium and has been
steadily going down. He has been selling out
this residence, pulling down the houses and cut-
ting down the trees, and selling the wood and

62 Drugging a Nation

old bricks. He is now a beggar in the streets of
Jen Tsuen.

** All through the hills west of Tai Yuan-fu the
peasants are addicted to the use of opium. About
seventy per cent, of the population take opium
in one form or another. I was speaking to a
number of them who had come into an inn at
which I was stopping. I asked them if they
wanted to give up the use of opium. They said
yes, but that they had not the means to do so.
Everybody would like to give it up. The women
smoke, as well as the men.

*' The smoker does not trouble himself to plant
seeds, nor to go out.

" The houses in Shansi are very good ; in fact,
they are better than in other provinces, but they
are rapidly going to ruin owing to the excessive
smoking of opium, and wherever one goes the
ruins are seen on every side. On the roads the
people can get a little money by selling things,
but off the main roads the distress is worse than
anywhere else.

** Up in the hills I stopped at a village and in-
quired if they had any food for sale, and they
told me that they had nothing but frozen pota-
toes. So I asked to be shown those, and I went

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 63

into one of the hovels and found little potatoes,
perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all
strewn over the kang (the brick bed), where they
were drying. As soon as they were dry, they
were to be ground down into a meal of which
dumplings were made, and these were steamed.
That was their only diet, and had been for the
past month. They had no money at all. What
money they had possessed had been spent on
opium, and they could not expect anything to
make up the crop of potatoes the following
autumn. I noticed in a basin a few dried sticks,
and I asked what they were for, and the man
told me they were the sticks taken from the sieve
through which the opium was filtered for purifi-
cation. These sticks are soaked in hot water,
and the Water, which contains a little opium, is
drunk. They were using this in place of opium.
I gave this man twenty cents, and the next day
when I returned he was enjoying a pipe of opium.
'< While passing through an iron-smelting vil-
lage I noticed that the blacksmiths who beat up
the pig iron were regular living skeletons. They
work from about five in the morning until about
five in the evening, stopping twice during that
time for meals. When they leave off in the

64 I^nigging a Nation

evening, after a hasty meal they start with their
pipes and go on until they are asleep. I do not
know how these men can work. I presume that
it was the hard work that made them take to
opium-smoking.

*' On asking people why they had taken to the
drug, they invariably replied that it was for the
cure of a pain of some sort — for relieving the
suffering. The women often take to it after
childbirth, and this is generally what starts them
to smoking.

** The wealthier men who smoke opium nearly
all day cannot enter another room until this
room has first been filled with the fumes of
opium. Some one has to go into the room first
and smoke a few pipes, so that the air of the
room may be in proper condition.

'' There was an official in Shau-ying who used
to keep six slave girls going all day filling his
pipes. The slave girls and brides very often try
to commit suicide by eating opium, owing to
the harsh treatment they receive."

Eveiywhere along the highroad and in the
cities and villages of Shansi you see the opium
face. The opium-smoker, like the opium-eater,
rapidly loses flesh when the habit has fixed itself

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 65

on him. The colour leaves his skin, and it be-
comes dry, like parchment. His eye loses what-
ever light and sparkle it may have had, and be-
comes dull and listless. The opium face has
been best described as a << peculiarly withered
and blasted countenance." With this face is
usually associated a thin body and a languid gait
Opium gets such a powerful grip on a confirmed
smoker that it is usually unsafe for him to give up
the habit without medical aid. His appetite is
taken away, his digestion is impaired, there is con-
gestion of the various internal organs, and conges-
tion of the lungs. Constipation and diarrhoea re-
sult, with pain all over the body. By the time he
has reached this stage, the smoker has become
both physically and mentally weak and inactive.
With his intellect deadened, his physical and
moral sense impaired, he sinks into laziness, im-
morality, and debauchery. He has lost his
power of resistance to disease, and becomes pre-
disposed to colds, bronchitis, diarrhoea, dysentery,
and dj^pepsia. Brigade Surgeon J. H. Condon, \,/
M. D., M. R. C. S., speaking of opium-eaters be-
fore the Ro3ral Commission on Opium, said:
'' They become emaciated and debilitated, miser-
able-looking wretches, and finally die, most

66 Drugging a Nation

commonly of diarrhoea induced by the use of
opium."

When a man has got himself into this con-
dition, he must have opium, and must have it all
the time. I have already pointed out that
opium-smoking not only is perhaps the most ex-
pensive of the vices, but that, unlike opium-eat-
ing, it consumes an immense amount of time.
Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes
for them, like that wealthy official at Shau-ying.
It takes a seasoned smoker from fifteen minutes
to half an hour to prepare a pipe to his satisfac-
tion, smoke it, and rouse himself to begin the
operation again. If he smokes ten or twenty
pipes a day, which is common, and then sleeps
off the effects, it is not hard to figure out the
number of hours left for business each day.
When he has slept, and the day is well started,
his body at once begins to clamour for more
opium. He must begin smoking again, or he
will suffer an agony of physical and mental tor-
ture. His ten to twenty pipes a day will cost
him from fifty cents or a dollar (if he is a poor
man and smokes the scrapings from the rich
man's pipe), to ten or twenty dollars (or more, if
he smokes a high grade of opium). I learned of

\

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 67 ^

many wealthy merchants and officials who smoke
from forty to sixty pipes a day.

It is just at this period, when the smoker is so
enslaved by the drug that he has lost his earning
power, that his opium expenditure increases most
rapidly. He is buying opium now, not so much
to gratify his selfish vice, as to keep himself alive.
He becomes frantic for opium. He will sell any-
thing he has to buy the stuff. His moral sense
is destroyed. A diseased, decrepit, insane being,
he forgets even his family. He sells his bric-a-
brac, his pictures, his furniture. He sells his
daughters, even his wife, if she has attractions, as
slaves to rich men. He tears his house to pieces,
sells the tiles of his roof, the bricks of his walls,
the woodwork about his doors and windows. He
cuts down the trees in his yard and sells the
wood. And at last he crawls out on the high-
way, digs himself a cave in the loess (if he has
strength enough), and prostrates himself before
the camel and donkey drivers, whining, chatter-
ing, praying that a few copper cash be thrown to
him.

^ Since there are no statistics in China, I can give
the reader only the observations and impressions
of a traveller. But Shansi Province is full of

«

68 Dnigging a Nation

ruins. So are Szechuan and Yunnan and Kuei-
chow, and half a dozen others. It is with the
province as a whole much as it is with the indi-
viduals of that province. The raising of opium
to supply this enormous demand crowds off the
land the grains and vegetables that are absolutely
needed for human food. The manufacture of
opium and its accessories absorbs the energy and
capital that should go into legitimate industry.
The government of the province and the govern-
ment of the empire have become so dependent
on the immense revenue from the taxation of
this ^* vicious article of luxury " that they dare
not give it up. In the body politic an unhealthy
condition not only exists, but also controls.
Drifting into it half-consciously, the province has
been sapped by a vicious economic habit. That
is what is the matter with Shansi. That is what
is the matter with China. All the way along my
route in Shansi I photographed the ruins that
typify the disaster which has overtaken this
opium province. And a few of these photo-
graphs are reproduced here, all showing houses
of men who were well-to-do only a few years
ago. It will be plainly seen from the cuts, I
think, that these ruins are not the result of age.

A Glimpse Into an Opium Province 69

The sun-dried bricks of the walls show few signs
of crumbling. The walls themselves are not
weather-beaten, and have evidently been de*
stroyed by the hand of man, and not by time.

IV

CHINA'S SINCERITY

CHINA is the land of paradox. If it is an
absolute, despotic monarchy, it is also a
very democratic country, with its self-
made men, its powerful public opinion, and a
<< states' rights " question of its own. It is one of
the most corrupt of nations ; on the other hand,
the standard of personal and commercial honesty
is probably higher in China than in any other
country in the world. Woman, in China, is
made to serve ; her status is so low that it would
be a discourtesy even to ask a man if he has a
daughter : yet the ablest ruler China has had in
many centuries is a woman. It is a land where
the women wear socks and trousers, and the men
wear stockings and robes ; where a man shakes his
own hand, not yours ; where white, not black, is
a sign of mourning; where the compass points
south, not north; where books are read back-
ward, not forward ; where names and titles are

put in reverse order, as in our directories—-

70

China's Sincerity 71

Theodore Roosevelt would be Roosevelt Theo-
dore in China, Uncle Sam would be Sam U«y i*^ ; ^
where fractions are written upside down, as |,
not ^ ; where a bride waijs bitterly as she is car-
ried to her wedding, andja^man laughs when ^^ ll\ O^Q
tells you of his mother's death!j[ • Ul t ( |

Chinese life, or the phases of it that you see
along the highroads of the northwest, would ap-
pear to be a very simple, honest life, industrious,
methodical, patient in poverty. The men, even
of the lowest classes, are courteous to a degree
that would shame a Frenchman. I have seen my
two soldiers, who earned ten or twenty cents,
Mexican, a day, greet my cook with such grace
and charm of manner that I felt like a crude bar-
barian as I watched them. The simplicity and
industry of this life, as it presented itself to me,
seemed directly opposed to any violence or out-
rage. Yet only seven years ago Shansi Province
was the scene of one of the most atrocious mas-
sacres in history, modern or ancient. During a
few weeks, in the summer of 1900, one hundred
and fifty-nine white foreigners, men, women, and
children, were killed within the province, forty-
six of them in the city of T'ai Yuan-fu. The
massacre completely wiped out the mission

72 Dnigging a Nation

churches and schools and the opium refuges, the
only missionaries who escaped being those who
happened to be away on leave at the time. The
attack was not directed at the missionaries as
such, but at the foreigners in general. It was
widely believed among the peasantry that the
foreign devils made a practice of cutting out the
eyes, tongues, and various other organs of chil-
dren and women and shipping them, for some
diabolical purpose, out of the country. The
slaughter was directed, from beginning to end,
by the rabid Manchu governor, Yii Hsien, and
some of the butchering was done by soldiers
under his personal command. But the interest-
ing fact is that the docile, long-suffering people
of Shansi did some butchering on their own ac-
count, as soon as the word was passed around
that no questions would be asked by the officials.
Apparently, the Shansi peasant can be at one
time simple, industrious, loyal, and at another
time a slaying, ravishing maniac. The Chinaman
himself is the greatest paradox of all. He is the
product of a civilization which sprang from a
germ and has developed in a soil and environ-
ment different from anything within our Western
range of experience. Naturally he does not see

China's Sincerity 73

human relations as we see them. His habits and
customs are enough different from ours to appear
bizarre to us ; but they are no more than surface
evidences of the difference between his mind and
ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we
can be fairly certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or
even a European, will think in certain deeply
human circumstances — in the presence of death,
for instance. We cannot hope to understand
the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is
too great a difference in the shape of our heads,
as there is in the texture of our traditions.

But we can see quite clearly that the imperial
government of China is, while it endures, a strong
and effective government It is significant that
the Chinese people rarely indulge in massacres on
their own account. Why not ? The hatred of
foreigners must be always there, under the placid
surface, for these people rarely fail to turn into
slaying demons once the officials let the word be
passed around. There have been thirty- five
serious anti-foreign riots and massacres in China
within thirty-five years, besides the Boxer upris-
ing of 1900 ; and among these there was probably
not one which the mandarins could not have
suppressed had they wished. The Boxer trouble

74 Dnigging a Nation

was worked up by Yii Hsien while he was
governor of Shantung Province. When the
foreign powers protested he was transferred to
Shansi, which had scarcely heard of the Boxer
Society, and almost at once there was a '* Boxer ''
outbreak and massacre in Shansi. The Peking
government meanwhile carried on Yii Hsien's
horrible work at Peking and Tientsin. The siege
of the legations at Peking was conducted by im-
perial soldiers, not by mobs. During all the
trouble of that bloody summer, Yuan Shi K'ai,
who succeeded to the governorship in Shantung,
seemed to have no difficulty in keeping that
province quiet, though it was the scene of the
original trouble.

Chang Chi Tung, " the great viceroy," subdued
the Upper Yangtse provinces with a firm hand,
though the Boxer difficulty there was complicated
by the ever-seething revolution. In a word, the
officials in China seem perfectly able to control
their populace and protect foreigners. As Dr.
Ferguson, of Shanghai, put it to me, " No other
government in the world can so effectively en-
force a law as the Chinese government — when
they want to I "

You soon learn, in China, that you can trust a

China's Sincerity 7^

Chinaman to cany through anything he agrees
to do for you. When I reached Tai Yuan-fu I
handed my interpreter a Chinese draft for ^200
(Mexican), payable to bearer, and told him to go
to the bank and bring back the money. I had
known John a little over a week; yet any one
who knows China will understand that I was
running no appreciable risk. The individual
Chinaman is simply a part of a family, the
family is part of a neighbourhood, the neighbour-
hood is part of a village or district, and so on.
In all its relations with the central government,
the province is responsible for the afiairs of its
lai^er districts, these for the smaller districts, the
smaller districts for the villages, the villages for
the neighbourhoods, the neighbourhoods for the
family, the family for the individual. If John
had disappeared with my money after cashing
the draft, and had afterwards been caught, pun-
ishment would have been swift and severe.
Very likely he would have lost his head. If the
authorities had been unable to find John, they
would have punished his family. Punishment
would surely have fallen on somebody.

The real effect of this system, continued as it
has been through unnumbered centuries, has

76 Drugging a Nation

naturally been to develop a clear, keen sense of
personal responsibility. For, whatever may oc-
cur, somebody is responsible.. The family, in
order to protect itself, trains its individuals to
live up to their promises, or else not to make

promises. The neighbourhood, well knowing

•

that it will be held. accountable for its units,
watches them with a close eye. When a new
family comes into a neighbourhood, the neigh-
bours crowd about and ask questions which are
not, in view of the facts, so impertinent as they
might sound. Indeed, this sense of family and
neighbourhood accountability is so deeply rooted
that it is not uucommon, on the failure of a
merchant to meet his obligations, for his family
and friends to step forward and help him to
settle his accounts. It is the only way in which
they can clear themselves.

All these evidences would seem to indicate
that the Chinese people, on the one hand; have
an innate fear of and respect for their govern-
ment and their law, such as they are ; and that
the government, on the other hand, is, in the
matter of enforcing the traditional law, one of
the most powerful governments on earth. None
but an exceedingly well-organized government

China's Sincerity 77

could deliberately incite its people to repeated
riots and massacres without losing control of
them. The Chinese government has seemed to
have not the slightest difficulty in keeping the
people quiet — ^when it wanted to. The story of
Shantung Province makes this clear. It was
driven into what appeared to be anarchy by a
rabid governor. But only a few months later
this governor's successor had little difficulty in
keeping the entire province in almost perfect
order while the adjoining province was actually
at war with the allied powers of the world and
was overrun with foreign troops. No; a gov-
ernment which has within it the power, on oc-
casion, to carry through such an achievement as
this, can hardly be called weak.

We begin, then, by admitting that the Chinese
government has the strength and the organiza-
tion necessary to carry out any ordinary reform
— if it wants to. The putting down of the opium
evil is, of course, no ordinary reform. It is an
undertaking so colossal and so desperate that it
staggers imagination, as I trust I have made
plain in the preceding articles. But setting
aside, for the moment, our doubts as to whether
or not the Chinese government, or any other

78 Drugging a Nation

government on earth, could hope to check so
insidious and pervading an evil, we have to con-
sider other doubts which arise from even a slight
acquaintance with that puzzling organism, the
Chinese official mind. If the Chinese business
man is, as many think, the most honest and
straightforward business man on earth, the
Chinese official, or mandarin, is about the most
subtle and bewildering. His duplicity is simply
beyond our understanding. He has a bland and
childish smile, but his ways are peculiar. Most
of us know that our own state department has a
neat little custom of issuing letters to travellers
ordering our diplomatic and consular representa-
tives abroad to extend special courtesies, and
sending, at the same time, a notice to these same
representatives advising them to take no notice
of the letters. In Chinese diplomacy every-
thing is done in this way, but very much more
so. Documents issued by the Chinese govern-
ment usually bear about the same relation to any
existing facts or intentions as a Thanksgiving
proclamation does. You must be very astute,
indeed, to perceive from the speech, manner, or
writing of a mandarin what he is really getting
at Motive underlies motive; self-interest li

China's Sincerity 79

deeper still ; and the base of it all is an Oriental
conception of life and affairs which cannot be so
remodelled or reshaped as to fit into our square-
shaped Western minds. No one else was so
eloquent on the horrors of opium as the great
Li Hung Chang, when talking with foreigners ;
yet Li Hung Chang was one of the largest pro-
ducers of opium in China. When the Chinese
army, under imperial direction, was fiercely
bombarding the legations in Peking, the im-
perial government was officially sending fruit
and other delicacies, accompanied by courteous
notes, asking if there was not something they
could do for the comfort of the hard-pressed
foreigners.

This indirection would seem to be the result
of a constant effort, on the part of everybody in
authority, to shirk the responsibility for difficult
situations. Under a system which holds a man
mercilessly accountable for carrying through any
undertaking for which he is known to be re-
sponsible, he naturally tries to avoid assuming
any responsibility whatever. An official is pun-
ished for failure and rewarded for success in
China, as in other countries. And the official
on whom is saddled the extremely difficult job

8o Dragging a Nation

of pleasing, at one time, an empress who believes
that a Boxer can render himself invisible to for-
eign sharpshooters by a little mumbling and
dancing, a set of courtiers and palace eunuchs
who are constantly undermining one another with
the deepest Oriental guile, a populace with little
more understanding and knowledge of the world
than the children of Israel in the Sinai Peninsula,
and a hostile band of keen, modern diplomats
with trade interests and " concessions " on their
tongues and machine guns and magazine rifles at
call in their legation compounds, is not in for an
easy time.

It hardly seems, then, as if we should blame
the Chinese official too harshly if his whole career
appears to be made up of a series of " side-step-
pings " and " ducks " — of what the American
boxer aptly calls "foot work." On the other
hand, it is not difficult to sympathize with the
foreign diplomat who has, year after year, to play
this baffling game. He is aiwsys making progress
and never getting anywhere. He has his choice
of going mad or settling down into a confirmed
and weary cynicism. In most cases he chooses
the latter, and ultimately drifts into a frame of
mind in which he doubts anything and eveiy-

China's Sincerity 81

thing. He takes it for granted that the Chinese
government is always insincere. It is incredible
to him that a Chinese official could mean what
he sa}^. And so, when the Chinese government
declared against the opium evil, the cynical for-
eign diplomats and traders at once began looking
between and behind the lines in the effort to find
out what the crafty yellow men were really get-
ting at. That they might mean what they said
seemed wholly out of the question. But what
deep motive might underlie the proposal was a
puzzle. At first the gossips of Peking and the
ports ran to the effect that the real scheme was
to arouse the anti-opium public opinion in Eng-
land, and force the British Indian government to
give up its opium business. Very good, so far.
But why ? In order that China, by successfully
shutting out the Indian opium, might set up a
government monopoly of its own, for revenue, of
the home-grown drug ? This was the first notion
at Peking and the ports. I heard it voiced fre-
quently everywhere. But it proved a hard theory
to maintain.

In the first place, the Chinese government could
set up a pretty effective government opium busi-
ness, if it wanted to, without bothering about the

82 Drugging a Nation

Indian-grown drug. Opium is produced every-
where in China. The demand has grown to a
point where the Indian article alone could not
begin to supply it But, on the other hand, the
stopping of the importation is necessarily the
first step in combating the evil ; for, if the Chinese
should begin by successfully decreasing their
own production of opium, the importation would
automatically increase, and consumption remain
the same.

In the second place, if it is wholly a <' revenue "
matter to the Chinese government, why give up
the large annual revenue from customs duties on
the imported opium ? In asking the British to
stop their opium traffic the Chinese are proposing
deliberately to sacrifice ^5,000,000 annually in
customs and liking duties on the imported drug,
or between a fifth and a siicth of the entire reve-
nue of the imperial customs.

One very convincing indication of the sincerity
of the Chinese government in this matter, which
I will take up in detail a little later, is the way in
which the opium prohibition is being enforced
by the Chinese authorities. But before going
into that, I should like to call attention to two
other evidences of Chinese sincerity in its war

China's Sincerity 83

J
on opium. The first is the patent fact that public

opinion all over China, among rich and poor,
mandarins and peasants, has turned strongly
against the use of opium. I have had this in-
formation from too many sources to doubt it.
Travellers from the remotest provinces are re-
porting to this effect. The anti-opium sentiment
is found in the highest official circles, in the
army, in the navy, in the schools. Within the
past year or so it has been growing steadily
stronger. Opium-smoking used to be taken as a
matter of course ; now, where you find a man
smoking too much, you also find a group of
friends apologizing for him. I have already ex-
plained that opium-smoking is not tolerated in
the " new " army. There is now a rapidly grow-
ing number of officials and merchants who refuse
to employ opium-smokers in any capacity.

Now, why is the public opinion of China set-
ting so strongly against opium? Even apart
from moral considerations, bringing the matter
down to a " practical " basis, why is this so ? I
will venture to offer an answer to the question.
Said one Tientsin foreign merchant, an American
who has had unusual opportunities to observe
conditions in Northern China : '' If the Chinese

84 Drugging a Nation

do succeed in shutting down on opium, it may
mean the end of the foreigners in China. Opium
is the one thing that is holding the Chinese back
to-day."

Ten or twelve of the legations at Peking now
have '< legation guards " of from one hundred to
three hundred men each. In all, there are eight-
een hundred foreign soldiers in Peking, ** a force
large enough/' said one officer/' to be an insult to
China, but not large enough to defend us should
they really resent the insult."

Twelve hundred miles up the Yangtse River,
above the rapids, there is a fleet of tiny foreign
gunboats, English and French, which were car-
ried up in sections and put together *' to stay."
At every treaty port there are one or more
foreign settlements, maintained under foreign
laws. The Imperial Maritime Customs Service
of China is directed and administered through-
out by foreigners ; this, to insure the proper col-
lection of the "indemnity" money. Foreign
" syndicates " have been gobbling up the won-
derful coal and iron deposits of China wherever
they could find them. And so on. I could
give many more illustrations of the foreign grip
on China, but these will serve. And back of

China's Sincerity 85

these facts looms the always impending " parti-
tion of China." The Chinese are not fools.
They have sat tight, wearing that inscrutable
smile, while the foreigners discussed the cutting
up of China as if it were a huge cake. They
have seen the Japanese, a race of little brown
men, inhabiting a few little islands, face the
dreaded bear of Russia and drive it back into
Siberia. Now, at last, these patient Chinamen
are picking up some odds and ends of Western
science. They are building railroads, and manu-
facturing the rails for them. They are talking
about saving China " for the Chinese." In 1906
they mobilized an army of 30,000 " modern "
troops for manoeuvres in Honan Province. If
they are to succeed with this notion, they must
begin at the beginning. Opium is dragging
them down hill. Opium will not build railroads*
Opium will not win battles. Opium will not ad-
minister the affairs of the hugest nation on earth.
Therefore, no matter what it costs in revenue, no
matter how staggering the necessary reform and
reorganization, opium must go.

China may be a puzzling land. The Chinese
officials may be capable of the most baffling
duplicity. But we are forced to believe that

86 Drugging a Nation

they are ** sincere " in putting down the opium
traffic. It appears, for China, to be a case of sink
or swim.

The next question would seem to be, if the
Chinese are really trying to put down the opium
traffic, how are they succeeding ? We will pass
over that part of the problem which relates to
Great Britain and the Indian opium trade, with
the idea of taking it up in a later chapter. Let
us consider now what China, flabby, backward,
long-sufTering China, is actually doing in this
tremendous effort to cure her disorder in order
that she may take a new place among the nations.
We will deal here with the enforcement of the
edict in Shansi Province, taking up in later
chapters the results of the prohibition movement
in the other provinces.

The plan outlined in the edicts prohibiting
opium is clear, direct, forcible. It was evidently
meant to be effective. It provides (first) that the
governors of the provinces shall ascertain,
through the local authorities, the exact number
of acres under poppy cultivation. The area of
the land used for this purpose shall then be cut
down by one-ninth part each year, " so that at
the end of nine years there will be no more land

China's Sincerity 87

used for such purposes, and the land thus
disused " — I am quoting here from the China-
man who translated the regulations for me —
" shall never be used for the said purposes again.
Should the owners of such lands disobey the
decree, their lands shall be confiscated. Local
officials who make special efforts and be able to
stop the cultivation of poppy before the said
time, they shall be rewarded with promotions."
The plan provides (second) that " all smokers,
irrespective of class or sex, must go to the nearest
authorities to get certificates, in which they are
to write their names, addresses, profession, ages,
and the amount of opium smoked each day."
Latitude is allowed smokers over sixty years of
age, but those under sixty '' must get cured be-
fore arriving at sixty years of age. Persons who
smoke or buy opium without certificates will be
punished. No new smokers will be allowed
from the date of prohibition. The amount of
opium supplied to each smoker must decrease by
one-third each year, so that within a few years
there will be no opium smoked at all." Officials
who overstep the law are to be deprived of their
rank. In the case of common people, " their
names will be posted up thoroughfares, and will

88 Drugging a Nation

be deprived of privileges in all public gather-
ings."

Opium dens, as also all restaurants, hotels,
and wine-shops which provide couches and
lamps for smokers were to be closed at once. If
any regular opium den was found open after the
prohibition (May, 1907), the property would be
confiscated. No new stores for the sale of opium
could be opened.. " Good opium remedies must
be prepared. Multiply the number of anti-
opium clubs. If any citizens who can, through
their efforts, get many people cured, they will be
rewarded. . . • All officials, and the officers
of the army and navy, and professors of schools,
colleges, and universities, must all get cured
within six months." And further, it was decided
to " open negotiations with Great Britain, arrang-
ing with that power to have less and less opium
imported into China each year, till at the end of
nine years no opium will be imported at all."
The Chinese, it is evident, are not wanting in
hopeful sentiment Reading this, it is almost
possible to forget that India needs the money.

" There is another drug, called morphia, which
has done (thus my Chinaman's translation) or
is doing more harm than opium. The custom

China's Sincerity 89

authorities are to be instructed to prohibit strictly
the importation of it, except for medical uses."

A clean-cut programme, this; apparently
meant to be effective. It was with no small
curiosity that I looked about in Shansi Prov-
ince to see whether there seemed any likelihood
of enforcement. The time was ripe. It was
April; in May the six months would be up.
Opium had ruled in Shansi: could they hope
to depose it before the final havoc should be
wrought ?

The nub of the situation was, of course, the
limiting of the crop. Theoretically, it should be
easier to prohibit opium than to prohibit alco-
holic drinks. Wines and liquors are made from
grains and fruits which must be grown anyway,
for purposes of food. It would not do to at-
tempt to prohibit liquor by stopping the cultiva-
tion of grains and fruits. The poppy, on the
other hand, produces nothing but opium and its
alkaloids. In stopping the growth of the poppy
you are depriving man of no useful or necessary
article. The poppy must be grown in the open,
along the river-bottoms (where the roads run).
It cannot be hidden. As government regulating
goes, nothing is easier than to find a field of

90 Drugging a Nation

poppies and measure it. The plans of the Shansi
farmers for the coming year should throw some
light on the sincerity of the opium reforms.
Were they really arranging to plant less opium ?
Yes, they were. Reports came to me from
every side, and all to the same effect. West and
northwest of T'ai Yuan-fu many of the farmers
had announced that they were planting no pop-
pies at alL This, remember, was in April:
planting time was near ; it was a practical propo-
sition to those Shansi peasants. In other re-
gions men were planting either none at all, or
"less than last year." The reason generally
given was that the closing of the dens in the
cities had lessened the demand for opium.

The officials were planning not only to make
poppy-growing unprofitable to the farmers, they
were planning also to advise and assist them in
the substitution of some other crop for the poppy.
But here they encountered one of the peculiar
difficulties in the way of opium reform, the trans-
portation problem. All transportation, off the
railroads, is slow and costly. No other product
is so easy to transport as opium. A man can
carry several hundred dollars' worth on his
person; a man with a mule qan carry several

China's Sincerity 91

thousand dollars' worth. That is one of the
reasons why opium is a more profitable crop
than potatoes or wheat. But the law descends
without waiting for solutions of all the problems
involved. The closing of the opium dens all
over Shansi had the immediate efiect of limiting
the crop. It also had the effect of driving out of
business a great many firms engaged in the
manufacture of pipes and lamps. Sixty-two
manufacturing houses in one city, Taiku, either
went out of business altogether during the spring
months, or turned to new enterprises. I add an
interesting bit of evidence as to the effectiveness
of the enforcement. It is from a missionary.

'« I was calling on one of the foreigners in Tai
Yuan-fu and found a beggar lying on one of the
door-steps, with his pipe and lamp all going. I
told him to clear out I asked him why he was
there, and he told me he had nowhere else to go,
now that the smoking-dens were all closed, and
that he had to find some sheltered nook where
he could have his smoke."

It was not the plan to close the opium sale
shops ; theoretically, it will take nine or ten years
to do that. But after closing all the places where
opium was smoked socially and publicly, it should

92 Drugging a Nation

become possible to register all the individuals
who buy the drug for home consumption. It
was the closing of the dens, the places for public
smoking, in all the cities of Shansi, which had
the immediate effect of limiting the crop and the
manufacture of smoking instruments. The one
hundred and twenty*nine dens of T'ai Yuan-fu
were all closed before I arrived there. In T'ai
Yuan-fu, as in Peking, you could buy an opium-
smoker's outfit for next to nothing. Cloisonne
pipes, mounted with ivory and jade, were offered
at absurd prices.

One of the saddest features of the situation in
Shansi is the activity of the opium-cure fraud.
The opium-smoking habit can be cured, once
the social element is eliminated, as easily as the
morphine or cocaine habits — more easily, some
would claim. I do not mean to say that a de-
graded, degenerate being can be made over, in a
week, into a normal, healthy being ; but it does
not seem to be very difficult to tide even the
confirmed smoker over the discomfort and dan-
ger that attend breaking off the habit. In Shansi,
as in all the opium provinces, '' opium refuges "
are maintained by the various missions. The
usual plan is to charge a small fee for the medi-

China's Sincerity 93

cines administered, in order to make the refuges
self-supporting. It takes a week or ten days to
effect a cure by the methods usually followed.
The patient is confined to a room, less and less
opium is allowed from day to day, stimulants
(either strychnine or atropine) are administered,
and local symptoms are treated as may seem
necessary to the physician in charge. Some of
the missions at first took a stand against the re-
duction method, believing that medical mission-
aries should not administer opium in any form ;
but after a death or two they accepted the inevi-
table compromise, recognizing that it is not safe
to shut down the supply too abruptly. But the
number of these refuges is pitifully small beside
the extent of the evil. They have been at work
for a generation without bringing about any per-
ceptible change in the situation. There are now
fewer refuges than formerly in Shansi Province,
for none of the missions is fully recruited as yet,
after the terrible set-back of 1900.

The opium-cure faker in China, as in the
United States and Europe, usually sells morphia
under another name. Dr. Edwards, the author
of " Fire and Sword in Shansi," last year spent
five weeks in travelling northwest of T'ai Yuan-fu,

94 Drugging a Nation

and reported finding a great many men employed
in selling so-called anti-opium medicines. The
demand for cures existed everywhere. Now that
the popular sentiment is setting in so strongly
against the opium habit, the Chinese are pecu-
liarly easy prey for these rascals. They have
no conception of medicine as it is practiced in
Western countries, and eagerly take whatever is
offered to them in the guise of a " cure." The
following, told to me by an Englishman who
lives in the province, illustrates this :

" There is a lot of mischief being done in
Shansi just now by men who have bought drugs
in Tientsin, are selling them at random, and mak-
ing a good thing for themselves. I was travelling
one day and was taken violently ill, and I hap-
pened to reach a place where I knew a man who
had some drugs, so I sent for him and asked him to
bring me some medicine. He came along with
three bottles, none of which was labelled. He
could not tell me what any one of them contained.
He said they were all good for stomach-ache,
and proposed to mix the three up and give me
a good, strong dose. It is needless to say I re-
fused. That man is running a proper establish-
ment and making a lot of money on the drugs he

China's Sincerity 95

sells, and that is all he knows about the busi-

ness."

The upshot of my investigations and inquiries
in Shansi was that the anti-opium edicts were be-
ing enforced to the letter. This conclusion
reached, I naturally looked about to find the man
behind the enforcement. Judging from the work
done, he should prove worth seeing. Further
inquiries drew out the information that he was
one of the three rulers of the province, with the
title of provincial judge, and that his name was
Ting Pao Chuen.

Calling upon a prominent Qiinese official is, to
a plain, democratic person, rather an impressive
undertaking. The Rev. Mr. Sowerby had kindly
volunteered to act as interpreter, and him I im-
pressed for instructor and guide through the
mazes of official etiquette. It was arranged that
I should call at Mr. Sowerby's compound at a
quarter to four. From there we would each ride
in a Peking cart with a driver and one extra
servant in front. There was nothing, apparently,
for the extra servant to do ; but it was vitally
important that he should sit on the front platform
of the cart.

A Peking cart is a red-and-blue dog house^

96 Drugging a Nation

balanced,without springs, on an axle between two
heavy wheels. The sides, back, and rounding
roof are covered with blue cloth. A curtain
hangs in front. In the middle of each side is a
tiny window, and it is at such windows that you
occasionally get the only glimpses you are ever
likely to get of Chinese ladies. There is no seat
in a Peking cart; you sit on the padded floor.
When you get in, the servant holds up the front
curtain, you vault to the front platform, and,
placing your hands on the floor, propel yourself
backward, with as much dignity as possible, tak-
ing care not to knock your hat against the roof,
until you have disappeared inside. If you are
long of leg, your feet will stick out in front of the
curtain, leaving scant room for the two servants,
who sit, one on each side, with their feet hanging
down in front of the wheels. The two carts, two
drivers, and two extra servants, set out from
the Baptist Mission compound, to convey Mr.
Sowerby and me to the YUmen, or official resi-
dence, of His Excellency.

Every Yimen has three great gates barring the
way to the inner compound. If the resident
official wishes to humiliate you, he has his man
stop your cart at the first gate and compels you

China's Sincerity 97

to enter on foot. Fortunately for us, since it
was raining hard, His Excellency had chosen to
treat us with marked courtesy. The carts halted
at the second gate while Mr. Sowerby's servant
ran in with our red Chinese cards. There was a
brief wait^ and then we drove on through a long
courtyard to the inner or screen gate, where
massive timbered doors were closed against us.
Soon these swung open; the carts crossed a
paved yard and pulled up under the projecting
roof of the YUmen porch; and we scrambled
down from the carts, while two tall mandarins, in
official caps and buttons, dressed in flowing
robes of silk and embroidery, came rapidly for-
ward to meet us. One of these, the younger and
shorter, I recognized as Mr. Wen, the interpreter
for the Shansi foreign bureau.

The other mandarin was a man of ability and
charm. Some of us, perhaps, have formed our
notion of the Chinaman from the Cantonese laun-
dryman type which we may have seen at his bench
or on the Third Avenue elevated railway in New
York. This would be about as accurate as to
call the coster at his barrow the typical English-
man ; just about as accurate as to call the Bowety
loafer the typical American. His Excellency ap-

98 Drugging a Nation

peared to be close to six feet in height ; he was
erect and lithe of figure, with marked physical
grace. He greeted Mr. Sowerby by clasping his
hands before his breast and bowing, then turned,
and with a genial smile extended his right hand
to grip mine. He used no English, but the
Chinese language, as he spoke it, was both dig-
nified and musical, and not at all like the sing-
song jabbering I had heard on the streets and
about the hotels.

Ting led the way into a reception-room which
was furnished in red cloth and dark woods.
There was a seat and a table against each side,
and two red cushions on the edge of a platform
across the end of the room, with a low table be-
tween them. An attendant appeared with tea.
Ting took a covered tea bowl in his two hands,
extended it towards me, bowed, then placed it on
the low stand— thus indicating the seat which I
was to take, on the platform. Mr. Wen said, in
my ear, '< Sit down." Mr. Sowerby was placed
at the other side of the stand ; the two Chinese
gentlemen seated themselves at the two side-
tables, facing each other. One thing I remem-
bered from Mr. Sowerby 's coaching — I must not
touch my bowl of tea. I must not even look at

China's Sincerity 99

it The tea is not to drink; it is brought in
order that the caller may be enabled to take his
leave gracefully. The Chinese gentlefolk are so
wedded to life's little ceremonies that guest and
host cannot bring themselves to talk right out
about terminating a visit. The guest would
shiver at the notion of saying, '* Well, I must go,
now." Instead, he fingers his tea bowl, or per-
haps merely glances at it ; and then he and his
host both rise.

His Excellency fixed his eyes on me and ut-
tered a deliberate, musical sentence. " He says,"
translated Mr. Sowerby, " that you have come to
help China." I am afraid I blushed at this. It
had not occurred to me to state my mission in
just those words. I replied that I had come, as

•

a journalist, to learn the truth about the opium
question. We talked for an hour about the won-
derful warfare which China is waging against her
besetting vice. " China is sincere in this strug-
gle," he said. *' Public opinion was never more
determined." He asked me if I had investi.
gated the new Malay drug which had lately been
heralded as a specific for opium-poisoning. '* If,"
he said, " you should learn of any real cure, while
you are investigating this subject, I wish you

loo Drugging a Nation

would advise me about it." I promised him I
would do so. I had already heard from a num^
ber of sources that Ting was personally giving
two to three thousand taels a month (a tael is
about seventy-five cents) to the support of opium
refuges and for the purchase of drugs for distri-
bution among the poor. " China is sick/' he
said ; " she must be cured so that she may hold
up her head among the nations."

Shortly after we had driven back through the
rain and had mounted the stairs to Mr. Sowerby's
library, a Yimen runner was shown into the
room, bearing presents from the provincial judge.
The runner bowed to me and presented his tray.
On it, beside the large red " card " of Ting Pao
Chuen, were four bottles of native wine, or
" shumshoo," two cans of beef tongue, and two
cans of sauerkraut I

SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA— SHANGHAI

IN her development China is dependent on
the adoption of Western ideas and is in-
fluenced by the example set by Western
civilization. This modernizing influence is
strongest at the point where the Westerner meets
the Chinaman, where the two civilizations come
into direct contact. At Shanghai, Tientsin,
Hankow, Hongkong, and the other ports there
are some thirty to forty thousand Europeans,
Englishmen, and Americans. They build splen-
did buildings and lay good pavements. They
bring with them the best liquors. The life they
live gives about as accurate an impression of West-
em civilization— of what the Western nations
stand for — as the great majority of the Chinese
(a most observing race) are ever likely to receive.
We have examined into China's sincerity, now
let us examine into the honesty of purpose of
the foreign " concessions " and " settlements "
which fringe the China Coast. If these commu-
nities are representing our civilization out there,

zoi

102 Druggmg a Nation

it seems fair to ask whether they are representing
it well ; for if they are misrepresenting us, if they
are contributing to the sort of international mis-
understanding which breeds trouble, we may as
well know it.

When, in the course of her gropings and strug-
glings towards civilization, China turns for en-
lightenment to the great, successful nations of
Europe and America, what does she see ? Well,
for one thing, she sees Shanghai.

Shanghai has been called the Paris of the ex-
treme East. It is the paradise of the adventurer
and the adventuress, of the gambler, the beach-
comber, and the long-chance promoter. Midway
of the China Coast, at the mouth of the mighty
Yangtse River, it is the principal port of entrance
into China. From England, Germany, France,
Australia, Japan, the United States, and Canada
comes an endless column of steamships to
Shanghai. To Hongkong, Saigon, Bangkok,
Singapore, Chefoo, Tientsin, and the uppermost
ports of the Yangtse, 1,250 miles inland, go end-
less columns of steamships from Shanghai. And
of the travellers on these ships nearly all have, or
expect to have, or have had, business or pleasure
at Shanghai.

Sowing the Wind in China 103

It is the most truly cosmopolitan city in the
world ; for Paris, after all, is mainly French ; Lon-
don, after all, is mainly English ; New York, after
all, is mainly American. Shanghai has its
French hotels, its imposing German Club, its
English Country Club, its race-track, its Russian
Bank, its Japanese mercantile houses, its Ameri-
can post-office. It is ruled by a council of Eng-
lishmen, Germans, and Americans. It is policed
by English bobbies. Irishmen, Sikhs from India,
and Chinamen. On the Bubbling Well Road, of
a sunny spring afternoon, where the latest thing
in motor cars weaves through the line of smart
carriages, you may see Spaniard elbowing Fili-
pino, Portuguese jostling Parsee, Austrian chat-
ting with Bavarian ; and they all talk, gamble,
drink, and buy in pidgin English.

This settlement of fifteen thousand Europeans,
living apart from that public opinion which com-
pells the maintenance of a social standard in
every European country, and indiiTerent to that
local public opinion which keeps up a certain
curious standard among the Chinese themselves,
seems to have practically no standard at alL The
problem of every decent American or English-
man who finds himself established in business is

104 I^nigging a Nation

whether he dare bring his wife and family and
introduce them into circles so degraded that
families disintegrate and children grow up under
disheartening influences. The heavy drinking
of the China Coast ports is proverbial, yet the
drinking seems little more than an incident in a
city where the social atmosphere is tainted and
altogether unwholesome.

I stood one night in the barroom of one of the
big hotels. It was one o'clock in the morning,
and nearly every one of the dozen white men in
the room was more or less drunk. They were
roaring out maudlin songs, and shouting inco-
herent cries. Two men, well-dressed gentlemen,
were on the floor. And behind the bar, yawn-
ing, waiting for an opportunity to close up and
go to sleep, stood two Chinese men and one boy.
They were neat, respectful, and perfectly sober.
Their almond eyes flitted about the room, taking
in every detail of that beastly scene. It would
be impossible to say what they were thinking,
but I observed that they did not smile as a China-
man usually does. Perhaps, to the reader who
does not know the China Coast, it seems unfair
to cite this case as an example of the active in-
fluence of our civilization in China. I will not

Sowing the Wind in China 105

do so. I will merely ask if you could ever hope
to make those three young Chinamen believe
that our civilization is superior to theirs.

Where such a low moral tone prevails, in a self-
governing community, it is bound to limit the
perception and the power of the government of
that community. Let any observing visitor ac-
quaint himself with Shanghai and its social and
moral standards (which will not be difficult, for
these will be thrust upon him soon after his ar-
rival) and he will soon see for himself that the
residents of Shanghai, while they freely and hotly
criticize their council, never accuse it of priggish-
ness or of moral restraint. This is enough to
show that the council makes no effort to oppose
the prevailing sentiment. The gambling business
attains, in Shanghai, to the altitude of a consider-
able industry. During the race weeks, spring
and fall, the vacant lots near the race-track are
rented at high rates by those gamblers of all
nations who have no regular quarters, and the
games go on merrily in the open air, within full
view of the crowds in the road. Now seven of
the nine members of the council are Englishmen.
English ideas are supposed to prevail in the set-
tlement, feebly seconded by German and Ameri-

io6 Drugging a Nation

can. And the laws under which Shanghai is
theoretically governed forbid gambling.

All the lower forms of organized vice combine
to form a large and highly profitable branch of
Shanghai's commerce. Partly because of the
willingness of the locally stronger nations to
shoulder off the responsibility for a disgraceful
state of things, and partly because of the number
of adventurous and unprincipled Americans who
have drained off to the China Coast, America has
had to endure more than her share of the blame
for this condition. For years every degraded
woman who could speak the language has called
herself an *' American girl " ; until the term,
which at home arouses a natural pride, has grown
so unpleasant that decent Americans have chafed
under the insult. To-day it is best not to use
the phrase " American girl " on the China Coast.

Of the other and less vicious sorts of adven-
turers who turn up like bad pennies at Shanghai,
the beach-comber is easily the most picturesque.
Many writers, notably Robert Louis Stevenson,
have employed him as a character in fiction.
The majority of the beach-combers probably are
or have been seafaring men. Next in numerical
order, probably, come the discharged soldiers and

Sowing the Wind in China 107

the deserters. It takes either a certain amount
of money or a certain amount of ability for any
unattached American or European to get out to
the China Coast, and an equal amount for him to
get back. Therefore the stranded soldiers and
sailors, brought out there at the cost of nation or
ship owner, beating their way from port to port,
drinking, gambling, starving, ready for any du-
bious enterprise that promises quick returns on a
small investment, are a sorry lot. The sharps,
swindlers, and shadowy promoters, on the other
hand, are men necessarily possessed either of
money or wit sufficient to get them out to China,
and not unnaturally they represent the higher
grades of their various crafts. From Peking to
Hongkong, the coast is infested with these gen-
tlemanly rascals, each with impressive garments
and a convincing story. Josiah Flynt once wrote
a tale of some enthusiastic young promoters who
undertook, at a considerable outlay in capital and
in personal risk, to sell a steam calliope to the
Grand Lama of Thibet. After a brief acquaint-
ance with the diverse and ingenious schemes that
sprout, flower, and go to seed on the China Coast,
this tale seems not nearly so improbable as it per-
haps sounds to the casual reader.

io8 Dnigging a Nation

Other, and more recent, types of adventurers
are the stranded free-lance journalist and camp-
followers who were lured Eastward by the pros-
pect of pickings along the trails of the Japanese
and Russian armies during the late war, and who
later found themselves unable to get back home.
In 1906, Consul-Greneral Rodgers, of Shanghai,
reported as follows on the subject of unscrupu-
lous Americans who have been imposing on the
Chinese to the detriment of American trade :

*' There are many things which can be given as
current reasons for retarding American trade in
the Orient. The advent of a class of Americans,
like those who came from Manila after a brief ex-
perience there, and those who tried their fortunes
in connection with the events of the Russo-
Japanese War, has done a great deal to injure the
American name and reputation with the Chinese.
This class, usually indigent, has, by reason of im-
position upon the Chinese, destroyed to some ex-
tent a confidence which has existed for many
years and which had borne good fruit. There
are good reasons for saying that every American
firm which contemplates sending a representative
to China should be very certain of his character,
and, other things being equal, should choose the

Sowing the Wind in China 109

quiety orderly person rather than the reverse type,
in spite of the current opinion that such are in-
dicated for the Orient."

If Shanghai is the sort of a place that it would
here appear to be, if it sets a vicious example in
its government, in its business practice, and in
the character of many of its inhabitants, the fact
would seem to indicate that it is most decidedly
misrepresenting out there the sort of civilization
that we, Europeans as well as Americans^ have
always supposed that we stood for. It would ap-
pear that the Chinese, at the point of contact
with our civilization, are getting a false impres-
sion of us. It would be easy to dismiss as re-
mote and unimportant the vicious example set
by a group of adventurers and promoters on the
China Coast ; but unfortunately this little group is
the most important single contributing factor in
the exceedingly delicate matter of the rapidly
developing relations between China and the great
Christian nations.

The influence of the Shanghai example on
China is real and positive. Geographically,
Shanghai commands the trade of the middle
coast, the immense Yangtse Valley, and the
Grand Canal. Every night a big river steamer

no Dnigging a Nation

leaves for Hankow and the intermediate river
ports. Every day a big river steamer comes in
from the same cities. Trading junks and small
steamers innwnerable ply between the river and
coast ports and Shanghai. Chinese merchants
come from hundreds of miles around to trade
with the foreigners or with the native " compra-
dores " attached to foreign houses. On their re-
turn to their various interior cities or villages
these traders spread tales of the foreign devils
who inhabit the great city near the sea. Foreign
merchants, travelling salesmen, engineers, and in-
surance agents travel up and down the great
river, up and down the coast ; they penetrate, by
steamer, railroad, mule-litter, or cart, into the in-
terior cities of the great provinces, leaving every-
where on plastic minds distinct and ineflaceable
impressions of their manners, business methods,
and morals.

In the foreign settlement of Shanghai, and
apart from the population of the native city
which adjoins it, there are, roughly, 450,000
Chinese who have chosen to dwell in the territory
and under the laws of the white men. This
population is not fixed, but fluctuates as the
floating element comes and goes; and every-

Sowing the Wind in China iii

where that this floating element travels when out
of the city it leaves an impression — a story, a bit
of gossip, an example of the sharp dealing
learned from the foreigner— -of the manners, busi-
ness methods, and morals of Shanghai. The
native newspapers comment frankly on life and
conditions in the great seaport, and their com-
ments are reprinted in the papers of the interior.
Shanghai exerts a direct and result-breeding in-
fluence on fifty to seventy-five million native
minds, and an indirect influence on all China.
How many scores of fair-minded, straightforward
merchants, how many thousands of scattered
missionaries and teachers will it take, think you,
to counteract that influence ?

China, grappling with the problem of decay,
fighting desperately against an evil which the
most nearly Christian of the Christian nations
has fastened on her, looks westward for enlight-
enment, and sees — Shanghai. And Shanghai —
well Shanghai plays the races and the roulette
wheel, and drinks, and forgets the sacred
significance of marriage and the economic im-
portance of the home, and goes to the club,
and except in casting up profits gives never
a thought to that vast, muttering populace that

112 Drugging a Nation

waits — waits — for the day of tlie under-dog to
come. ^

Such was the condition of things when the
Chinese war on opium began to assume effective
proportions during the spring of 1906. Now,
Shanghai — the *< settlement/' that is — was in a
peculiar, an unfortunate, condition as regarded
the anti-opium crusade. I have already given,
in an earlier chapter, the estimate of Robert E.
Lewis, general secretary of the Y. M. C. A., at
Shanghai, that there were, in 1906, nearly 22,000
places in the international settlement, little and
big, where opium could be purchased, more than
19,000 of which kept pipes, lamps, and divans on
the premises for smokers. All of the dens which
were openly conducted were paying a regular
license fee to the municipal government, amount-
ing last year to 98,000 Shanghai taels, or about
$70fyoo in gold. It is against the law to permit
women or children to enter the smoking-dens,
and a clause to this effect is printed on the license
as a condition in granting it ; yet when Captain
Borisragon, the chief of police, was asked how
many regular women inmates were in the dens,
he replied, in writing, that there were at least
3,200 women so kept, and doubtless a great

Sowing the Wind in China 113

many more who did not appear on his records.
When the tax and license department was asked
why this clause was not enforced, the reply was
made, without the slightest attempt at excuse or
explanation, that when a license was issued to
the keeper of an *' opium brothel " the clause
prohibiting women inmates was erased.

These curious facts combine to present an ap-
pearance familiar to one who has studied the mu-
nicipal protection of vice in this country. It is
asking too much of human credulity to expect
one to believe that this clause was regularly
erased for nothing. But apart from what individ-
ual graft there may have been in it, that $yoflOO
in revenue was an item not to be lightly given
up by the hard-headed municipal council. And
the amount of money put into circulation by the
patrons of these dens was also an attractive item,
as Shanghai sees things. The prevailing opinion
among the foreigners of << the settlement " was
simply and flatly that the settlement could not
afford to close the dens. The leading English
newspaper hastened to defend the sordid attitude
of the council by explaining that, as the licenses
were issued for a year, they had no right to close
the places, at least before the spring of 1908.

114 Drugging a Nation

The interesting and significant fact is that
while this miserable condition of affairs was
allowed to drag along in the international
settlement, where the white men rule, the
Chinese native city, inmiediately adjoining, was
strictly enforcing the anti-opium edicts. The
Chinese authorities went about the enforcement
in a thoroughly effective manner. The date set
for the closing of the dens was May 22, 1907.
There was some fear that the closing down
might precipitate a riot, and, accordingly, the
authorities took measures to keep the populace
in hand. Chinese soldiers were placed on guard
at the places where crowds would be most likely
to gather, the dens were quietly dosed, pad-
locked, and the shutters put up ; and red signs,
calling attention to the imperial edict prohibit-
ing opium, were pasted up on doors or shutters.
It was quite evident that the proprietors of these
dens took the enforcement most seriously.
Some of them went immediately into other lines
of business ; others made their places over into
tea-houses.

So at Shanghai the Chinese warfare on the
'< foreign smoke" was waged earnestly and
effectively in the native city. The Chinese

IN AN OPIUM DEN, SHANGHAI

r^wT

iS4

1- -a"*

^

2

1

—"' -

i

.:«,.

-M

^H

■■

OPIUM SMOKING

Sowing the Wind in China 115

authorities closed the dens — permanently, it
seems fair to believe. And the only result of
their heroic action, — and it is an heroic action to
suppress a prosperous and thoroughly established
branch of commerce in any city, — ^the only result
was that the opium business went over to the ad-
joining city of the foreigners, who gladly ac-
cepted it, and took the money which had
formerly been spent in the native city. The
foreigners live wholly outside of and above
Chinese law. They have their own strips of
land, their own courts, their own local govern-
ment, all guaranteed to them by the treaties
which China has, at one time or another, been
forced to sign. When the Chinese first proposed
to stamp out opium, these foreigners laughed,
and talked about the chronic insincerity of the
Chinese government. When the yellow men
did stamp out opium in that native city a mile
or so away, these foreigners said that it would
not be fair to the holders of licenses to close
down in the settlement. As I have had oc-
casion to say before, the Chinese are not fools.
They grasped the significance of the situation,
and spoke out frankly. The local mandarins
protested to the settlement council. The native

ii6 Drugging a Nation

newspapers called attention to it. And all this
clear insight into an extraordinary situation and
the frank comment on it were communicated, by
the routes and the means which I have described
earlier in this chapter, to the fifty or seventy-five
million Chinese who are directly influenced by
conditions at Shanghai. Now, in the light of
these facts, in the light of what they see and
know, it is time to ask, and to ask with feeling —
How can you hope to make those fifty to seventy-
five million Chinamen believe that our civiliza-
tion, with its science, and its whisky, and its
keen grasp on " revenue," and its contradictory
and confusing teachings of Christianity, is su-
perior to their civilization ? And if they do not
believe that our civilization is superior, how long
do you suppose they will endure the treatment
they receive from us ? As time rolls on, there
will be more " Boxer" uprisings in China, more
crazy and disastrous protests against foreign domi-
nation and exploitation. When these troubles
come, it will be well to recall that Shanghai, —
not the individual inhabitants, but the govern-
ment of that little "settlement" of foreigners
which lies upon the west bank of the Woosung
River, — officially and for profit maintained its

Sowing the Wind in China 117

traffic in the drug that is China's curse after the
Chinese had stopped their own opium traffic. It
will be well to recall it, because it is quite certain
that the Chinese themselves will not have for-
gotten it.

I have gone thus at length into the deplorable
example which Shanghai, the most important
foreign settlement in China, exhibits to the
struggling, opium-ridden yellow men, because it
is typical of the whole course of the foreigner in
China. In the next chapter we shall consider
further evidence in looking into the condi-
tions of life and of the opium problem at Hong-
kong and Tientsin. It is of course peculiarly
unfortunate that Shanghai, when the great op-
portunity came to extend a helping hand to
China in the opium fight, should have failed,
utterly, ignominiously. But the slightest ac-
quaintance with the place is enough to make it
plain that Shanghai, as it has been and still is, is
not likely to extend a helping hand to anybody.
The helping hand is not exactly what Shanghai
stands for. It really stands for the domination
of the great Yangtse Valley, for the exploitation
of China, and, incidentally, for a sort of snug
harbour for criminals and degenerates. There

li8 Drugging a Nation

can be no doubt that the fifty to seventy-five
millions of Chinese who come directly within
the radiating influence of Shanghai know this
perfectly well. It is also quite likely that these
and the few hundred other millions who make
up " the Middle Kingdom " know perfectly well,
that the complicated commercial establishments
of all the various foreign nations in China stand
for similar principles. And they doubtless know
further that the vety important and very cynical
gentlemen who represent the great and prosper-
ous foreign powers at Peking, are there for no
other purpose than diplomatically to put on the
pressure whenever China chances to block a
move or gain a piece in this sordid and unholy
game of chess. So perhaps we had better give
up, once and for all, any serious consideration of
the charges made by certain foreign powers that
China is insincere in her warfare on opium.
Such charges and insinuations, coming from
such soiu'ces, hardly command respect

It is plain that this greedy exploitation, going
so far as even to snatch a profit out of the opium
struggle, is not a healthy basis of intercourse be-
tween great nations. If the Chinese were a Congo
tribe, or a race of American Indians, this policy

Sowing the Wind in China 119

might pay commercially; for in that case it
would be a matter for the Christian nations of
simply killing off the Chinese or driving them
off the landy and then of fighting among them-
selves over the division of the spoils. But this
policy, which succeeds against weak and numeri-
cally small nations, will hardly succeed in China.
Driving four hundred million Chinese off the land
would be a large order, a vety different thing, in-
deed, from wiping out a tribe of " Fuzzy Wuzzys "
with machine guns. All of the military observ-
ers with whom I have talked in China show a
tendency to grow thoughtful over the subject of
China's potential military strength. From the
days of the T'ai Ping Rebellion and " Chinese "
Gordon's " ever victorious " army, down to the
review of 30,000 of Yuan Shi K'ai's troops, with
modern weapons and modern drill, in Honan
Province in the summer of 1906, it has been
plain that the Chinese make splendid soldiers
when properly led. And yet it seems to have
occurred to few white statesmen that the deepest
interests of trade itself, sordid trade, demand that
China be treated fairly and that the relations be-
tween China and the powers be established on
a basis that makes for mutual respect and for

120 Dragging a Nation

peace, rather than on a basis that makes for
exploitation, outrage, massacre, warfare, '' in-
demnity," and smouldering hate. John Hay
saw over the balance-sheet, when he established
the " open door " policy. Elihu Root has seen
over the balance-sheet in arranging to waive
the future claims of this country for indemnity
money. And Lord Elgin, for England, saw
over the balance-sheet when he outlined that
sound policy which he was afterwards one of the
first to violate — " Never to make an unjust de»
mand of China, and never to recede from a de-
mand once made." To-day it seems apparent
that the great nations cannot be brought to-
gether to agree on any really enlightened policy
in China. Even had such a thing been possible
a few years ago, the untrustworthy methods of
Russia and the growing ambitions of Japan
would make it impossible to-day. Nations
which, when brought together in a " Peace
Conference," cannot even agree upon the rules
of war, will hardly forego the chance of seizing
some special advantage in the colossal grab-bag
which is China. And so it seems likely that the
genial commercial adventurers and gamblers and
vice promoters of Shanghai will go on sowing

Sowing the Wind in China 121

the wind in China — and that the sullen hate of
those silent, observing millions of yellow men
will deepen and smoulder until the final day of
reckoning, the day of reaping, shall come.

There is one ray of light which, to-day, illumi-
nates the China Coast. It is a small ray, when
we consider the number of dark corners to be il-
luminated, and yet there is the bare possibility
that it may prove the beginning of better condi-
tions. Somewhat less than two years ago the
United States government established a wholly
new institution, the United States Court for
China. L. R. Wilfley, one of the legal officers
whom Judge Taft had trained in Manila during
his governorship of the Philippines, was ap-
pointed the first judge of this court, and was
sent out, with a district attorney, a marshal, and
a clerk, to administer justice to Americans up
and down the China Coast and along the Yangtse
River. By treaty, all American citizens are ex-
empt from judgment under the Chinese law, that
peculiar jumble of tradition, superstition, com-
mon sense, and Oriental severity. Formerly, jus-
tice had been dealt out in courts presided over
by the consul-generals and the consuls in their
respective districts.

122 Drugging a Nation

Now it should be obvious to the most casual
observer that the peculiar conditions and the
peculiar industries which thrive in the treaty
ports give rise to a considerable number of legal
entanglements. There is, of course, a large vol-
ume of legitimate business transacted on the
Coast, which gives legitimate employment to a
few lawyers; but there is a volume of illegiti-
mate and semi-legitimate business which would
also naturally give employment to other lawyers.
At the time of Judge Wilfley's appointment one
thing was clear to the enlightened heads of our
Department of State at Washington; the con-
sular courts, thanks to the skill and resource of
the American lawyer on the Coast, were in a
constant tangle of perplexed inefficiency, and the
American name was sinking steadily lower in
China.

It is likely that no American judge ever faced
so peculiar and difficult a task as that assigned
to Judge Wilfley. It was his duty to take the
place of a lacking public opinion, and to raise
the drooping prestige of his country. He had
behind him no settled code of laws, but merely a
few treaties and a few orders from the Depart-
ment of State. He had not only to judge cases

Sowing the Wind in China 123

between Americans, but also cases between
Americans and citizens of other nationalities,
including the Chinese themselves. He had to
establish rulings on the most complicated mat-
ters of coastwise commerce, in a land where
coastwise commerce is involved with perplexing
local customs and superstitions. Above all, he
had, from the start, to fight a well-organized, well*
entrenched band of shady characters who had
run their course for so long without anything in
the nature of a public opinion to hold them in
check that they resented his advent as an en-
croachment on their vested right to do as they
chose. The last and most perplexing of his
problems was that in rooting out these evils he
was in danger at every turn of arraying against
him the citizens of other nationalities and even
of arousing the active enmity of the courts and
the officials of other nations, most of whom had
been content to let Shanghai jog along in its
easy-going, sordid way.

It is to Judge Wilfley's everlasting credit that,
with a full knowledge of the difficulties and dan-
gers before him, he went straight to the heart of
the problem. Seeing that certain American
lawyers had long stood between the old consular

124 I^ugging a Nation

courts and anything which could be called jus-
tice, he set to work first to solve the problem of
the lawyers. His campaign for a higher stand-
ard on the Coast has not been without its humor-
ous moments. Mr. Bassett, his shrewd young
district attorney, preceded him to Shanghai to
**look the ground over." The little group of
American lawyers at Shanghai made haste to
get acquainted with him. One of the ablest
among them invited him, casually and informally,
to dinner. When Bassett arrived at the dinner
he found himself, to his astonishment, confronted
with thirty or forty ** leading citizens," including
all the American lawyers and several men of
questionable business character whom he rather
expected to be prosecuting a little later on.

After the cofTee and cigars, the host rose, and
in a neat little speech called on Bassett to tell
the company something about Judge Wilfley
and what work he meant to do in Shanghai. It
was a difficult situation. A slow-witted man
might have found himself in a fix. But Bassett,
if I may credit the account which reached me,
was equal to the situation. He rose, and looked
around the table from face to face.

** Gentlemen," he said, '' as I have come un-

Sowing the Wind in China 125

prepared for this pleasure, I shall have to fall
back on story-telling. In the small hours, one
morning, two men who had been having rather
too good a time were navigating from street
corner to street corner. Said Smith, < Jonesh,
shtime to go home. Shgetting broad daylight.
Theresh sun shining up there.'

"*No, Shmith,' replied Jones, 'you're mis-
taken. Tha'sh moon up there, and it's night'
They staggered down the street. Smith insisting
that it was day, Jones insisting that it was night,
until they met a fellow inebriate clinging to a
fire plug. To him they appealed their dispute.
He heard them out, and then looked thought-
fully up at the moon. For a long time he
puzzled over the problem, and finally, giving it
up, turned to them and said politely, ' Gentlemen,
you'll have to 'scuse me. I'm a stranger in town.'

** And, gentlemen," said Bassett, again looking
about from face to face, " you'll have to excuse
me. I'm a stranger in town."

Judge Wilfley began by calling upon every
American lawyer who was practicing in Shanghai
to bring a certificate of good moral character and
to pass an examination before he could be ad-
mitted to practice in the new court. The ex-

126 Drugging a Nation

amination was given, and only two of the lawyers
passed. At once there was a hubbub. The
judge was attacked hotly. One of the lawyers
who failed to pass hurried over to this country,
making a speech at Honolulu, on the way, in
which he insinuated charges of corruption against
Judge Wilfley. Shortly after his arrival at San
Francisco, he prevailed upon the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals, on the Pacific Coast, to reverse
one of Judge Wilfley's decisions without having
the facts of the whole case in hand and without
a hearing from the China court. He went on to
Washington, and within a month or two last
winter actually got a bill through the United
States Senate reinstating all the disqualified
lawyers. The bill is before the House at this
present session. He has conducted a newspaper
campaign against Judge Wilfiey in this country
since his return last year. It seems only fair to
call attention to these facts on a fearless and able
man, because Judge Wilfley is too hard at work
in a distant country to be able to defend himself.
In the course of my travels from port to port
last year, it became clear to me that this new
court was the one uplifting factor in a distressing
general condition.

Sowing the Wind in China 127

Judge Wilfley, like his district attorney^ seems
to hold no visionary theories, in spite of the
high standard he has set Before leaving China,
I made it a point to call on him and talk with
him about the work he is doing in the interest
of the American name. He seemed to recognize
clearly enough that vice and depravity can no
more be put down out of hand in Shanghai than
they can be put down out of hand in New York
or Chicago or Boston. But he maintained that
the disreputably open flaunting of vice can be
stopped. In fining the " American girls " II500
(gold) each, and driving a number of them off
the Coast, his attack has been directed mainly
against the dishonourable use of an honourable
phrase. In imprisoning or driving away the
American gamblers, he has been trying to put
gambling down more nearly to the place it oc-
cupies, in this country, as a minor rather than as
a major branch of industry. Judge Wilfley has
undertaken an Herculean task. It seems to be
the hope of all that patient minority, the better
class of Americans on the China Coast, that he
will be permitted to continue his fight un-
hampered by political machinery '* back home."

There are two other points, besides Shanghai,

128 Drugging a Nation

at which the two kinds of civilization^ Western
and Eastern, come into contact — Hongkong and
Tientsin. Each is different from the other as
well as from Shanghai ; and each plays a curious
part in the opium drama. We shall take them
up in the next chapter.

VI

SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA— TIENTSIN

AND HONGKONG

IF you could avoid the suburbs of mud huts
and walled compounds, and step directly
down from an airship on the broad piazza
of the Astor House at Tientsin (no treaty port is
complete without its Astor House), you might
also imagine yourself in a thriving English town.
Set about this piazza are round tables, in bowers
of potted plants, where sit Britishers, Germans,
and Americans, with a gay sprinkling of soldiery.
Across the street there is a green little park,
where plump British babies are wheeled about
and children romp among the shrubbery, and
where the Sikh band plays on Sundays. There
is nothing, unless it be the group of rickshaw
coolies at the curb, or the fat Chinese policeman
in the roadway, to recall China to the mind.

Yet Tientsin dominates all Northern China
much as Shanghai dominates the mighty valley
of the Yangtse. The railways and waterwas^s

(including the Grand Canal) all lead to Tientsin.

129

130 Dnigging a Nation

It is Peking's seaport. The viceroy of the
Northern Provinces makes it his seat of govern-
ment The chief point of contact between these
Northern Provinces and Western civilization, it is
through Tientsin that the new ideas which are
stirring the sluggish Chinese mind to new desires
and to a new purpose filter into one hundred
million Mongoloid heads.

The foreign settlement is simply a polyglot
cluster of nationalities, each with its " concession "
or allotment of land wrung from a browbeaten
empire, each with its separate municipal govern-
ment ruled by its own consul-general, and the
whole combined, for purposes of defense and ag-
gression, into a loosely knit city of seven or
eight thousand whites under the general direc-
tion of a dozen consulates. The British have
their polo, golf, and racing grounds ; the French
have their wealthy church orders and their Paris-
ian moving pictures ; the Germans have their
beer halls and delicatessen shops. The Japanese,
the Russians, the Italians, the Austrians, all the
powers, in fact, excepting the United States —
which holds no land in China — contribute their
lesser shares to the colour and the activity of this
extraordinary place. And only a mile or two away,

r

Tientsin and Hongkong 131

further up the crooked river, lies the huge, sprawl-
ing Chinese city, where nine hundred and fifty
thousand blue-dad celestials — nearly a round
million of them — ceaselessly watch the squabbling
groups of foreigners, and by means of newspa-
pers, travelling merchants, and the thousand and
one other instruments for the spreading of gos-
sip, tell all Northern China what they see.

Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an
electric, force in its influence on China. What-
ever the Chinese are to become in their struggle
towards the light of day will be in some measure
due to the example set by these two cities, the
only samples of Western civilization which the
Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The
missionary tells him of the God of the Western
peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates human-
kind; the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then
turns to look at the samples of regenerated
peoples that fringe his Coast. What he actually
sees will stick in his mind long after what he
merely hears shall have passed out at the other
ear. And these impressions that stick in the
Chinaman's mind are precisely the highly charged
forces that are revolutionizing China to-day.

While still at Peking, I had picked up more or

132 Di'ugging a Nation

less gossip which seemed to indicate that the
Tientsin foreign concessions were setting an un-
fortunate example in the matter of opium. In
several of the concessions there are thousands of
Chinese traders who have crowded in the white
man's territory, in order to make a living. These
Qiinese districts demand their opium, and they
have always been allowed to have it The opium
shops and dens are licensed, as are our saloons,
and the resulting revenue is cheerfully accepted
by the various municipalities. When the Chinese
officials set out to fight opium last winter and
spring, they asked the foreign consuls to cooper-
ate with them. This could be no more than a
friendly request, for the concessions are foreign
soil, that have passed wholly out of China's con-
trol ; but it was obviously of no use to close the
dens of the native city if smokers could continue
to gratify their desire by simply walking down
the road.

This request bothered the consuls. The Chinese
had adroitly placed them in a difficult position.
A failure to cooperate would look bad ; but
revenue is revenue, on the Chinese Coast as
elsewhere. More, if they could play for time,
the enforcement in the native city, by driving

Tientsin and Hongkong 133

the smokers over into the concessions, would
actually increase the revenue. So the consuls
played for time. They spread the impression
" back home " that they were going to close the
dens. When? Oh, soon — very soon. There
were matters of detail to attend to. The licenses
must run out Then, too, perhaps the Chinese
proposals were *' insincere " — a little time would
show.

The British concession boasted proudly that it
had no opium dens. This was true. The con-
cession is wholly taken up with British shops
and British homes, and there is no room for Chi-
nese residents. The German concession had so
few natives that it closed some of its dens and
took what credit it could. The Japanese quietly
put on the lid. But all the other concessions re-
mained " wide open."

So ran the Peking gossip. It seemed to me
worth while to follow it up ; for if it should prove
true that the concessions were actually profiting,
like Shanghai, by the native prohibition, that fact
would be significant. It would leave little to say
for the representatives of foreign civilization in
China.

There was a particular reason why the pro-

134 Drugging a Nation

hibition should be made effective in and about
Tientsin. The one official who stood before his
country and the world as the anti-opium leader,
who personified, in fact, the reform spirit which
is leavening the Chinese mass, was Yuan Shi
K'ai, the Northern viceroy. Tientsin was his
viceregal capital. Before he could hope to con-
vince the cynical observers of Britain and Europe
that the anti-opium crusade was really on, he had
to make good in his own city.

Yuan Shi K'ai is a remarkable man. Unlike
some of his colleagues who have travelled and
studied abroad, he has never, I believe, been over
the sea ; yet no Chinese official shows a firmer
grasp on his biggest and most bewildering of the
world's governmental problems. Practically a
self-made man (his father was a soldier), he
worked up from rank to rank, himself a part and
a product of the antiquated absolutism of his
country, until he emerged at the top, a red-but-
ton mandarin, a viceroy, with a personality tow-
ering above the superstitious, tradition-ridden
court, and yet sufficiently able and skillful to
work with and through that court. We have
seen, in an eariier chapter, how Yuan, then a gov-
ernor, kept Shantung Province quiet during the

Tientsin and Hongkong 135

Boxer outbreak. It is he who is building up the
*' new army " with the aid of German and Japa-
nese drill-masters. It is he who succeeded in in-
troducing the study of modern science into the
education of the official classes. He is committed
to the abolition of the palace eunuch system.
He has, during the past year, made great
headway with his bold plan to remodel this land
of fossilized ideas into a constitutional monarchy,
with a representative parliament. But first, and
above all else, he places the opium reforms. Un-
less this curse can be checked, and at least par-
tially removed, there is no hope of progress.

Throughout this magnificent struggle for a
new China, Viceroy Yuan has radically opposed
the very spirit and genius of his race ; but far
from ostracizing himself or splitting the govern-
ment, he has grown steadily in power and in-
fluence, until now, as a sort of prime minister, he
appears to hold the substance of imperial author-
ity in his hands. Try to imagine a self-made,
reform politician outwitting and beating down
the traditions of Tammany Hall in New York
City, multiply his difficulties by a thousand or
two, and you will perhaps have some notion of
the sheer ability of this great man, who has risen

136 lagging a Nation^

above the traditions^ even above the age-old
prejudices of his own people. There are many
Europeans in his retinue — physicians, military
men, engineers, educators — all of whom appar-
ently look up to him as a genuine superior. An
attachi summed up for me this feeling which
Yuan inspires in those who know him : '^ You
forget to think of him as a Chinaman/' said this
attachi^ '* as in any way different from the rest
of us."

The viceroy took a personal hand in the
Tientsin situation. On December 2, 1906, he
issues the following document to the North and
South Police Commissioners of Tientsin native
city. Rather than altar the quaint wording, I
quote just as it was translated for me :

" I have just received instructions from the
cabinet ministers enjoining me to act according
to the regulations which they presented to the
throne, and which received their Majesties' con-
sent. The evil effects of opium are known to
all. It is the duty of us all to act according to
the regulations, and do our utmost to get rid of
them.

" The North and South police commissioners
are authorized to close the opium dens, which

Tientsin and Hongkong 137

have been the refuge of idle hands and young
people who are not allowed to smoke at home.
The said dens are to be closed at the end of the
Tenth Moon (December 14th), at the same time
notifying the keepers of restaurants and wine
shops not to have opium-smoking instruments or
opium prepared for their customers, nor are their
customers allowed to take opium and smoke there.

'' As to the concessions, the Customs Taotai
is authorized to open conference with the differ-
ent consuls, asking them to close the opium dens
within a limited time."

The two police commissioners at once made
the proclamation public; and, as is evident from
the following " Reply to a petition," met with
difficulties in enforcing it :

** It is impossible to change the date of closing
dens. What is said in the petition, that the
keepers cannot square their accounts with their
customers, may be true, but the viceroy's order
must be obeyed. The dens shall be closed at
the specified time."

These orders were carried out. It is one of
the advantages of a patriarchal form of govern-
ment that orders can be carried out. There
were no injunctions, no writs to show cause, no

138 Dnigging a Nation

technical appeals. The few den keepers who
dared to violate the prohibition were mildly pun-
ished on the first oflense — ^most of them receiv-
ing two full weeks at hard labour. The real re-
sponsibility was placed upon the owners of the
property rented out to the den keepers. It was
recognized that these owners were the ones who
really profited by the vice. They were given an
opportunity to report any violations occurring
on their property; but if a violation occurred,
and the owner failed to report, his property was
promptly confiscated. Here we see successfully
employed a method which we in this country
have been unable as yet to put into effect The
futility of punishing engineers and switchmen for
the sins of railroad corporations, of punishing
clerks for the offenses of bank directors, of pun-
ishing keepers of disorderly houses in cases
where we know that the real profit goes, in the
form of a high rental, to the respectable owner
of the property, has long been recognized among
us. In China, while we see much that seems in-
tolerable in the enforcement of law, we must
admit that it is refreshing to find laws really en-
forced, and to see responsibility sometimes put
where it belongs. We of the United States are

Tientsin and Hongkong 139

far ahead of the Chinese in all that goes to make
up what we call civilization. But we have,
among others, a law forbidding the sale of liquor
on Sundays in New York City. We couldn't
enforce the law if we tried; and we haven't
enough moral courage to strike it off the books
for the dead letter it is.

Yes, the Tientsin situation has its refreshing
side. Yuan Shi K'ai — a Chinaman, — ^set about
it to close the opium dens that supplied this
swarming cityful of Chinamen, and succeeded.
He solved that most difficult problem which
confronts human governments everywhere — in
every climate, under every sky — the problem of
moral regulation. He drove the manufacturers
of opium and of opium accessories out of busi-
ness. He cut his way through a tangle of " in-
terests," vested and otherwise, not so different in
their essence from the liquor interests of this
country. Thanks to his own character and re-
source, thanks to the cheerful directness of Chi-
nese methods of governing (when directness and
not indirectness is really wanted), he " got re-
sults." And not only in Tientsin native city,
but also in Peking, and Pao-ting-fu, and all Chili
Province, and throughout Shansi Province, and

140 Drugging a Nation

over large portions of Shantung, Shansi, and
Manchuria. It was not a case of Maine prohi-
bition, or Kansas prohibition, or New York ex-
cise regulation. He closed the dens I

While he was accomplishing this result, and
while the native Chamber of Commerce was ap-
propriating a sum of money to found a hospital
for the cure of opium victims, the " Customs
Taotai," obeying the viceroy's instructions, cour-
teously requested the consuls, as rulers of the
foreign city, to help along by closing the dens in
their municipalities. It was mainly to see
whether or not the consuls were " helping " that
I went down to Tientsin. There was no need to
ask questions or to burrow among statistics.
The opium dens of the concessions were either
or they were not. Accordingly, I set out from
the Astor House at nine o'clock one evening, by
rickshaw. For interpreter I had Mr. Sung, the
secretary of the Native Young Men's Christian
Association, and with us went a young English-
man who spoke the language. This test seemed
a fair one to apply, for it was April 23d, nearly
five months after Viceroy Yuan's proclamation,
and several weeks after the closing of the last
dens in the native city.

Tientsin and Hongkong 141

We began with the French concession; and
our first glimpses of the thriving opium business
of the little municipality astonished us. The
Taiku Road, the main street, where one finds
churches, mission compounds, offices, and shops,
displayed a row of red lights. Our three rick-
shaws pulled up at the first and we went in.

An opium den usually takes up one floor of a
building. Against the walls is a continuous
wooden platform, perhaps two feet high and ex-
tending over seven or eight feet into the room.
This platform is divided at intervals of five or six
feet by low partitions, sometimes but a few
inches in height, into compartments, each of
which acconunodates two smokers, with one
lamp between them. Sometimes a rug or a bit
of matting is laid on this hard couch, sometimes
not ; for the Chinaman, accustomed to sleeping
on bricks, prefers his couches hard. A man
always lies down to smoke opium ; for the porous
pill, which is pressed into the tiny orifice of the
pipe, cannot be ignited, but is held directly over
the lamp and the flame drawn up through it.

The first den we entered was on the second
floor of a rickety building. We climbed the steep,
infinitely dirty stairway, crossed a narrow hall,

142 Drugging a Nation

and opened a door. At first I found it difficult
to see distinctly in the dim light and through the
thick blue haze ; and the overpowering, sickish
fumes of the drug got into my nose and throat
and made breathing a noticeable effort There
was a desk by the door, behind which sat the
keeper of the den, with a litter of pipes and
thimble-like cups before him. In a comer of the
desk was a jar of opium, a thick, sticky sub-
stance, dark brown in colour, in appearance not
unlike molasses in January. There were twenty
smokers on the couches, some preparing the
pellet of opium by kneading it and pressing it
on the pipe-bowl, some dozing off the fumes, and
a few smoking. An attendant moved about the
room with fresh supplies of the drug. For each
thimbleful, enough for one or two smokes, the
price was fifteen cents (Mexican).

The smokers seemed to be mainly of the
lower classes ; though hardly so low as coolies,
who are lucky to earn as much as fifteen cents in
a day. It was evident to both of my compan-
ions, from the appearance of these men and from
their talk, that they could ill afford the luxury.
The number of smokes indulged in seemed to
range from three or four up to an indefinite

Tientsin and Hongkong 143

number. The youngest and healthiest appearing
man in the room told us that after three pipes he
could go home and go to sleep in comfort. He
had been at it less than a year, he said ; and,
judging from the expression of peaceful content
that came over his face as he held the pipe-bowl
over the lamp and drew the smoke deep into his
lungs, he had not yet begun to feel the ravs^es
of the drug.

The next den we entered was small, crowded,
and dirty. The price was only ten cents. But
the third den was the largest and decidedly the
most interesting of any that we saw. Like the
others, it was situated in a prosperous section of
the Taiku Road, with its red light conspicuously
displayed over the door. From the facts that it
was frankly open for business and that not the
slightest concern was shown at our entrance, it
seemed fair to believe that the keepers had no
fear whatever of publicity or of the law. Even
when we announced ourselves to be investiga-
tors, our questions were answered cheerfully and
fully, and the man who escorted us from room to
room was apparently proud of the establishment.
The couches were not all occupied, but I counted
thirty-five men sitting or reclining on them.

144 lagging a Nation

One man had a child with him, a girl of some six
or eight years of age, and when he had prepared
his pipe and smoked it he permitted her to take
a whiff or two. In a rear room we saw four
women smoking with the men. The price of a
smoke in this den was twenty-five cents.

I do not know how many opium dens were
open for business in the French concession on
this particular April 23d, 1907^ but of those that
were open I personally either entered or at least
saw fifteen or sixteen, and that without attempt-
ing anything in the nature of an exhaustive
search. In the Italian and Russian concessions
I found about sixty dens open, mostly of a very
low grade. But the worst of the concessions, in
this regard, was the Austrian. Lying nearest to
the native city, it had profited more largely than
any of the others by the native prohibition. It
seemed also to have the largest Chinese popu-
lation ; indeed, in appearance it was more like
the quaint old Chinese city than any of the other
foreign municipalities.

We entered only three of the Austrian dens.
But we saw the signs and glanced in through the
doorways of so many others that I was quite
ready to accept Mr. Sung's rough estimate of the

Tientsin and Hongkong 145

total number within the narrow confines of the
concession : he put it at fifty to one hundred. It
is difficult to be exact in these estimates, because
where laws are so languidly enforced the official
returns hardly begin to state the full number of
flourishing establishments. These three dens
which we entered were enough to make an in-
efiaceable impression on the mind of one trav-
eller. I have eaten and slept in native hostelries,
in the interior, so unspeakably dirty and insani-
tary that to describe them in these pages would
exceed all bounds of taste, but I have never been
in a filthier place than at least one of these Aus-
trian dens. And the other two were little better.
It would require some means more adequate than
pen, ink, and paper, to convey to the reader an
accurate notion of the mingled, half-blended
odours which seemed to underlie, or to form a
background for, the overpowering fumes of what
passed here for opium. What this drug com-
pound was I really do not know ; but it was sold
at the rate of two pipes for three cents, Mexican,
equivalent to a cent and a half, gold. For real
opium, of fair or good quality, it is quite possible,
in China, to pay from ten to twenty times as
much. Such dens as this, then, are not only

146 Drugging a Nation

vicious resorts maintained for the purpose of
catering to a degrading habit ; they are also
breeding places of disease and pestilence.

Thus one night's work made it plain that the
foreign concessions were taking no steps that
would evidence a spirit of cooperation with the
Chinese authorities in their vigorous attempt
to check and control the ravages of opium.
Tientsini like Shanghai, did not care. Tientsin,
like Shanghai, is sowing the wind in China.

Let us now turn aside for a moment to con-
sider the third important point of contact between
the two kinds of civilization — Hongkong. "^

Hongkong is neither a << settlement " nor a
" concession." It is a British crown colony, with
its own government and its own courts. The
original property, a mountainous island lying
near the mouth of the Canton River, was taken
from the Chinese in 1842, as a part of the penalty
which China had to pay for losing the Opium
War. Later, a strip of the mainland opposite was
added to the colony. Hongkong is one of the
most important seaports in the world. It is the
meeting place for freight and passenger ships
from North America, South America, New
Zealand and Australia, India, Europe, Africa,

Tientsin and Hongkong 147

and the Philippines and other Pacific islands. It
commands the trade of the Canton River Valley,
which, though not geographically so imposing as
the wonderful valley of the Yangtse, supports,
nevertheless, the densely populated region reached
by the innumerable- canal-like branches of the
river. The city of Canton alone, eighty or ninety
miles inland from Hongkong, claims 2,500,000
inhabitants. It is safe to say that fifty million
Chinamen are constantly under the influence of
the civilizing example set by Hongkong.

What is the attitude of the Colonial government
towards the opium question ? Simply that the
opium habit is a legitimate source of revenue.
The British gentlemen who administer the gov-
ernment seem never to have been disturbed by
doubts as to the morality or humanity of their
attitude. Let me quote from the report of the
Philippine Commission :

" Farming is the system adopted (renting out
the monopoly control of the drug to an individual
or a corporation) and a considerable part of
the income of the colony is obtained from this
source; The habit seems to be spreading. No
effort — except the increased price demanded by
the farmer to compensate for the increased price

148 Drugging a Nation

he has to pay to secure the monopoly — is made
to deter persons from using opium in the colony.
Most of the opium comes from India."

The attitude of the residents and merchants of
the colony seems to be expressed plainly enough
by an editorial in a leading Hongkong paper
which lies before me, dated December i, 1906:
*' It will take volumes of imperial edicts to con-
vince us that China ever honestly intends or is
ever likely to suppress the opium trade. It is up
to China to take the initiative in such a way as to
leave no doubt that her intentions are honest and
that the native opium trade will be abandoned.
Until that is done, it is idle to discuss the ques-
tion."

In other words, Hongkong refuses to consider
giving up its opium revenue until the Chinese
take the market away from it.

I think we may consider the point established
that Great Britain is directly responsible for the
introduction of opium into China, and, through
the ingenuity and persistence of her merchants
and her diplomats, for the growth of the habit
in that country. To-day, in spite of an un-
mistakable tendency on the part of the Home
government (which we shall consider in a later

Tientsin and Hongkong 149

chapter) to yield to the pressure of the anti-opium
agitation in England, the government of India
continues to grow and manufacture vast quanti-
ties of the drug for the Chinese trade. To-day
the representatives of that government at Hong-
kong are profiting largely from a monopoly
control of the opium importation. To-day, at
Shanghai, where the British predominate in
population, in trade, and in the city government,
the opium evil is mishandled in a scandalous
manner, and — as elsewhere — for profit. Small
wonder, therefore, that other and less scrupulous
foreign nations, where they have an opportunity
to profit by this vicious traffic, as at Tientsin,
hasten to do so.

These three great ports — Shanghai, Tientsin, /

and Hongkong — are in constant touch com-
mercially with a grand total of very nearly
200,000,000 Chinese. They are, therefore, con-
stantly exerting a direct influence on that num-
ber of Chinese minds. As I have pointed out,
this influence, because it is concentrated and
tangible, is much stronger than the admittedly
potent influence of the widely scattered mission-
aries, physicians, and teachers. From the life
and example of the Western nations, as they

IjO Drugging a Nation

exist at these ports, the Chinaman is drawing
most of his ideas of progress and enlighten*
ment

In a word, the new China that we shall sooner
or later have to deal with among the nations of
the world is the new China that the ports are
helping to make — for this new China is to-day
in process of development. She is struggling
heroically to digest and assimilate the Western
ideas which alone can bring life and vigour to the
sluggish Chinese mass. And yet, turning west-
ward for aid, China is confronted with — Shang-
hai, Tientsin, and Hongkong. Turning to Brit-
ain for a helping hand in her effort to check the
inroads of opium, she hears this cheerful doc-
trine from the one British colony which China
can really see and partly understand, Hong-
kong — '^ It is up to China." Dr. Morrison has
stated in one of his letters to the Times that Brit-
ain's attitude towards China is one of sympathy,
tempered by a lack of information. One very
eminent British diplomat with whom I discussed
the opium question assured me that that attitude
of his government was "most sympathetic."
Later, in London, I found that this same govern-
ment was quieting an aroused public opinion

Tientsin and Hongkong 151

with assurances that steps were being taken
towards an agreement with China in the matter
of opium. All this was in the spring and sum-
mer of 1907. Six months later, the one British
colony in China, and the two great international
ports, were cheerfully continuing their cynical
policy of sneering at or ignoring the attempts of
the Chinese to overcome their master-vice, and
were cheerfully profiting by the situation.

It would perhaps seem fanciful to suggest that
the great nations should unite to regulate the
coast ports. It would appear obvious that such
regulation, in so far as it might create a better
understanding between the Chinese and the
representatives of foreign civilizations with whom
they must come in contact, would work to the
advantage of commercial interests. Anti-foreign
riots are in progress to-day in China which have
their roots partly in racial misconception, partly
in a long tradition of injustice and bad faith ; and
it is hardly necessary to suggest that an atmos-
phere of injustice, bad faith, and rioting is not
the best atmosphere in which to carry on trade.
But, nevertheless, the inevitable difficulties in the
way of drawing the great nations together in the
interests of a better understanding with the

152 Drugging ^ Nation

Chinese people would seem to make such a solu-*
tion academic rather than practical

But| still hoping that something may be done
about it, something that may lessen the likeli-
hood of the reaping of a whirlwind in China,
suppose that we alter the phrase of that Hong-
kong editorial and state that instead of the prob-
lem being up to China, it is distinctly up to
Great Britain ? Great Britain brought the opium
into China. Great Britain kept it there until it
took root and spread over the native soil. Great
Britain has admitted her guilt, and had pledged
herself by a majority vote in Parliament, and by the
promises of her governing ministers, to do some-
thing about it Suppose that Great Britain be
called upon to make good her pledge ? It would
be an interesting experiment. All that is neces-
sary is to cut down the production of opium in
India, year by year, until it ceases altogether,
and with it the exportation into China. This
course would solve automatically the opium
problem at Hongkong ; and it would put it up
to the municipal authorities at Shanghai and
Tientsin in an interesting fashion. It would in
no way jeopardize Britain's interest in the diplo-
matic balance of the Far East. It would work

Tientsin and Hongkong 153

for the good rather than the harm of the trade
with China. And it would be the first necessary
step in the arduous matter of cleaning up the
treaty ports and setting a higher example to
China.

To this course Great Britain would appear to
be committed by the utterances for her govern-
ment. But the world, like the man from Mis-
souri, has yet to be " shown." In a later chapter
we shall consider this question of promise and
performance in the light of Britain's peculiar
governmental problem.

VII

HOW BRITISH CHICKENS CAME HOME TO

ROOST

WE have seen, in the preceding chap-
ters, that the Anglo-Indian govern-
ment controls absolutely the produc-
tion of opium in India, prepares the drug for
the market in government-owned and govern-
ment-operated factories, and sells it at monthly
auctions. Let me also recall to the reader that
four-fifths of this opium is prepared to suit the
known taste of Chinese consumers. The annual
value to the Anglo-Indian government of this
curious industry, it will be recalled, is well over

^20,000,000.

Now we have to consider the last strong de-
fense of this policy which the British govern-
ment has seen fit to offer to a protesting world,
the report of the Royal Commission on Opium.
Against this stout defense of the opium traffic in
all its branches, we are able to set not only the
findings of other governments, such as those of
Japan, the Philippines, and Australia, which have

154

r

British Chickens Home to Roost 155

opium problems of their own to deal with, but
also the curious attitude of a certain British col-
ony, amounting almost to what might be called
an opium panic, on that occasion when the Ori-
ental drug found its way near enough home to
menace British subjects and British children.

The men who administer the government of
India have a chronically difficult job on their
hands. In order to keep it on their hands they
have got to please the British public ; and that is
not so easy as it perhaps sounds. It would appar-
ently please both the government and the public
if the whole opium question could be thrown after
the twenty thousand chests of Canton — into the
sea. But the British public is hard-headed, and
proud of it ; and the spectacle of the magnificent,
panoplied government of India gone bankrupt,
or so embarrassed as to be calling upon the
Home government for aid, would not please it at
all. Of the two evils, debauching China or
gravely impairing the finances of India, there has
been reason to believe that it would prefer de-
bauching China. That, at least, is what success-
ive governments of Britain and of India seem to
have concluded. It has seemed wiser to endure
a known quantity of abuse for sticking to opium

156 Drugging a Nation

than to risk the cold British scorn for the bank-
rupt ; and, accordingly, the Indian government
with the approval of one Home government after
another, has stuck to opium. The only alterna-
tive course, that of developing a new, healthy
source of revenue to supplant opium, the un-
healthy, would involve real ideas and an immense
amount of trouble ; and these two things are only
less abhorrent to the administrative mind than
political annihilation itself.

But there came a time, not so long ago, when
a wave of " anti-opium " feeling swept over Eng-
land, and the British public suddenly became
very hard to please. Parliament agreed that the
idea of a government opium monopoly in India
was '' morally indefensible," and even went so far
as to send out a " Royal Commission " to investi-
gate the whole question. Now this commission,
after travelling twenty thousand miles, asking
twenty-eight thousand questions, and publishing
two thousand pages (double columns, close print)
of evidence, arrived at some remarkable conclu-
sions. ''Opium," says the Royal Commission,
" is harmful, harmless, or even beneficial, accord-
ing to the measure and discretion with which it
is used. ... It is [in India] the universal

British Chickens Home to Roost 157

household remedy. ... It is extensively
administered to infants, and the practice does
not appear, to any appreciable extent, injurious.
. • . It does not appear responsible for any
disease peculiar to itself." As to the traffic with
China, the Commission states — " Responsibility
mainly lies with the Chinese government" And,
finally (which seems to bring out the pith of the
matter), " In the present circumstances the rev-
enue derived from opium is indispensable for
carrying on with efficiency the government of
India."

To one familiar with this extraordinary sum-
ming-up of the evidence, it seems hardly surpris-
ing that the Rt. Hon. John Morley, the present
Secretary of State for India, should have said in
Parliament (May, 1906) — " I do not wish to speak
in disparagement of the Commission, but some-
how or other its findings have failed to satisfy
public opinion in this country and to ease the
consciences of those who have taken up the
matter."

The methods employed by a Royal Commis-
sion which could arrive at such remarkable con-
clusions could hardly fail to be interesting. The
Government opium traffic was a scandal. Parlia-

158 Drugging a Nation

ment was on record against it. There was
simply nothing to be said for opium or for the
opium monopoly. It was '' morally indefen-
sible "-^officially so. It was agreed that the In-
dian government should be " urged " to cease
to grant licenses for the cultivation of the poppy
and for the sale of opium in British India. This
was interesting — even gratifying. There was but
one obstacle in the way of putting an end to the
whole business ; and that obstacle was, in some
inexplicable way, this same British government.
The opium monopoly, morally indefensible or
not, seemed to be going serenely and steadily
on. If the Indian government was urged in the
matter, there was no record of it.

Two years passed. Mr. Gladstone, the great
prime minister, deplored the opium evil — and
took pains not to stop or limit it. Like the
House of Peers in the Napoleonic wars, he " did
nothing in particular — and did it very well." So
the vigilant crusaders came at the government
again. In June, 1893, Mr. Alfred Webb moved
a resolution which (so ran the hopes of these
crusaders) the most nearly Christian government
could not resist or evade. Sure of the anti-opium
majority, the new resolution, " having regard to

g

British Chickens Home to Roost 159

the opinion expressed by the vote of this House
on the loth of April, 1891, that the system by
which the Indian opium revenue is raised is
morally indefensible, . . . and recognizing
that the people of India ought not to be called
upon to bear the cost involved in this change of
policy/' demanded that '<a Royal Commission
should be appointed ... to report as to (i)
What retrenchments and reforms can be effected
in the military and civil expenditures of India ;
(2) By what means Indian resources can be best
developed ; and (3) What, if any, temporary as-
sistance from the British Exchequer would be re-
quired in order to meet any deficit of revenue
which would be occasioned by the suppression
of the opium traffic."

The crusaders had underestimated the parlia-
mentary skill of Mr. Gladstone. He promptly
moved a counter resolution, proposing that " this
House press on the Government of India to con-
tinue their policy of greatly diminishing the cul-
tivation of the poppy and the production and
sale of opium, and demanding a Royal Commis-
sion to report as to (i) Whether the growth of
the poppy and the manufacture and sale of opium
in British India should be prohibited. • . •

i6o Drugging a Nation

(4) The effect on the finances of India of the
prohibition • . . taking into consideration
(a) the amount of compensation payable ; (b) the
cost of the necessary preventive measures ; (c) the
loss of revenue. ... (5) The disposition
of the people of India in regard to (a) the use of
opium for non-medical purposes ; (b) their will-
ingness to bear in whole or in part the cost of
prohibitive measures."

Mr. Gladstone's resolution looked, to the un-
thinking, like an anti-opium document. He
doubtless meant that it should, for in his task of
maintaining the opium traffic he had to work
through an anti-opium majority. Mr. Webb's
resolution, starting from the assumption that the
government was committed to suppressing the
traffic, called for a commission merely to arrange
the necessary details. Mr. Gladstone's resolution
raised the whole question again, and instructed
the commission not only to call particular atten-
tion to the cost of prohibition (the shrewd premier
knew his public ! ), not only to find out if the vic-
tims of opium in India wished to continue the
habit, but also threw the whole burden of cost on
the poverty-stricken people of India — which he
knew perfectly well they could not bear. The

British Chickens Home to Roost 161

original resolution had sprung out of a moral
outcry against the China trade. Mr. Gladstone,
in beginning again at the beginning, ignored the
China trade and the eilects of opium on tke
Chinese.

But more interesting, if less significant than
this attitude, was the suggestion that the Indian
government ** continue their policy of greatly
diminishing the cultivation of the poppy." Now
this suggestion conveyed an impression that was
either true or false. Either the Indian govern-
ment was putting down opium or it was
not. In either event, if Mr. Gladstone was not
fully informed, it was his own fault, for the ma-
chinery of government was in his hands. The
best way to straighten out this tangle would seem
to be to consult the report of Mr. Gladstone's
commission. This commission, on its arrival in
India, found no trace of a policy of suppressing
the trade. Sir David Balfour, the head of the
Indian Finance Department, said to the commis-
sion : " I was not aware that that was the policy
of the Home government until the statement was
made. . . . The policy has been for some
time to sell about the same amount every year,
neither diminishing that amount nor increasing

i62 Drugging a Nation

it. I should say decidedly, that at present our
desire is to obtain the maximum revenue from
the opium consumed in India." As regarded
the China trade. Sir David added: "We will
not largely increase the cultivation because we
shall be attacked if we do so/' And this — ** We
have adopted a middle course and preserved the
sMus quo with reference to the China trade."

Mr. Gladstone's resolution was adopted by 184
votes to 105, the anti-opium crusaders voting
against it And the Royal Commission, with
instructions not, as had been intended, to arrange
the details of a plan for stopping the opium
traffic, but with instructions to consider whether
it would pay to stop it, and if not, whether the
people of India could be made to stand the loss,
started out on its rather hopeless joumqr.

One thing the crusaders had succeeded in ac-
complishing — they had forced the government
to send a commission to India. They had got
one or two of their number on the body. The
commission would have to hear the evidence,
would be forced to air the situation thoroughly,
showing a paternal government not only manu-
facturing opium for the China trade, but actually,
since 1 891, manufacturing pills of opium mixed

British Chickens Home to Roost 163

with spices for the children and infants of India.
If the Indian government, now at last brought
to an accounting, wished to keep the opium
business going, they could do two things — ^they
could see that the " right " sort of evidence was
given to the commission, and they could try to in-
fluence the commission directly. They adopted
both courses; though it appears now, to one
who goes over the attitude of the majority of the
commission and especially of Lord Brassey, the
chairman, as shown in the records, that little
direct influence was necessary. Lord Brassqr
and his majority were pro-opium, through and
through. The Home government had seen to
that.

The problem, then, of the administrators of
the Indian government and of this pro-opium
commission was to defend a '< morally indefensi-
ble" condition of aflairs in order to maintain
the revenue of the Indian government. It was
a problem neither easy nor pleasant.

The Viceroy of India was Lord Lansdowne.
He went at the problem with shrewdness and
determination. His attitude was precisely what
one has learned to expect in the viceroys of
India. A later viceroy. Lord Curzon, has

164 Drugging a Nation

spoken with infinite scorn of the '' opium fad-
dists." Lord Lansdowne approached the busi-
ness in the same spirit He began by sending a
telegram from his government to the British
Secretary of State for India, which contained the
following passage: ''We shall be prepared to
suggest non-official witnesses, who will give in-
dependent evidence, but we cannot undertake to
specially search for witnesses who will give
evidence against opium. We presume this will
be done by the Anti-Opium Society." This
message had been sent in August, 1893, but it
was not made public until the i8th of the
following November. On November 20th Lord
Lansdowne sent a letter to Lord Brassey,
" which," says Mr. Henry J. Wilson, M. P., in
his minority report, " was passed around among
the members [of the commission] for perusal.
It contained a statement in favour of the exist-
ing opium system, and against interference with
that system as likely to lead to serious trouble.
This appeared to me a departure from the
judicial attitude which might have been expected
from Her Majest3r's representatives."

From this Mr. Wilson goes on, in his report,
to lay bare the methods of the Indian govern-

British Chickens Home to Roost 165

ment in preparing evidence for the commission.
To say that these methods show a departure
from the expected << judicial attitude " is to speak
with great moderation. It is not necessary, I
think, to weary the reader with the details of
these extended operations. That is not the
purpose of this writing. It should be enough to
say that Lord Lansdowne and his Indian govern-
ment ordered that all evidence should be sub-
mitted to the commission through their offices ;
that only pro-opium evidence was submitted; that
a government official travelled with the commis-
sion and openly worked up the evidence in
advance; that the minority members were
hindered and hampered in their attempts at real
investigation, and were shadowed by detectives
when they travelled independently in the opium-
producing regions; and, finally, that Lord
Brassey abruptly closed the report of the commis-
sion without giving the minority members an
opportunity to discuss it in detail. The result of
these methods was precisely what might have
been expected. Opium was declared a mild and
harmless stimulant for all ages. No home, in
short, was complete without it. 1

There is an answer to the report of the Royal

l66 Drugging a Nation

Commission on opium more telling than can be
found in speeches or in minority reports. In an
earlier article we examined into the beginnings
of opium. We saw how it is grown and manu-
factured ; how it passes out of the hands of the
British government into the currents of trade;
how it is carried along on these currents — small
quantities of it washing up in passing the Straits
and the Malay Archipelago — to China ; how it
blends at the Chinese ports in the flood of the
new native-grown opium and divides among the
trade currents of that great empire until every
province receives its supply of the " foreign dirt."
Now let us follow it farther ; for it does not stop
there.

The Chinese are great traders and great trav-
ellers. The weight of the national misery presses
them out into whatever new regions promise a
reward for industry. They swarmed over the
Pacific to America in a yellow cloud until
America, in sheer self-defense, barred them out.
They swarmed southward to Australia until
Australia closed the doors on them. They
swarm to-day into the Philippines and into
Malaysia. In the Straits Settlement, in a total
population of a little over half a million, more

British Chickens Home to Roost 167

than half (282,000) are Chinese. When America
would build the Panama Canal, her first impulse
is to import the cheap Chinese labourer, who is
always so eager to come. When Britain took
over the Transvaal she imported 70,000 Chinese
labourers. And where the Chinese travel^ opium
travels too.

The real answer to the Royal Commission on
opium should be found in the attitude of these
countries which have had to face the opium prob-
lem along with the Chinese problem. Let us in-
clude in the list Japan, a country which has had
a remarkable opportunity to view the opium
menace at short range. What Japan thinks
about opium, what Australia and the Transvaal
and the United States think, what the Philippines
think, is more to the point than any first-hand
statements of a magazine reporter. We will take
Japan first. Does Japan think that opium is in-
valuable as a general household remedy ? Does
Japan think that opium is good for children ?

Here is what the Philippine Opium Commis-
sion, whose report is accepted to-day as the most
authoritative survey of the opium situation, has
to say about opium in Japan :

*^ Japan, which is a non-Christian country, is

i68 Dnigging a Nation

the only country visited by the committee where
the opium question is dealt with in the purely
moral and social aspect. . . . Legislation is
enacted without tha distraction of commercial
motives and interest. . . . No surer testi-
mony to the reality of the evil effects of opium
can be found than the horror with which China's
next-door neighbour views it. . . . The
Japanese to a man fear opium as we fear the
cobra or the rattlesnake, and they despise its
victims. There has been no moment in the na-
tion's history when the people have wavered in
their uncompromising attitude towards the drug
and its use, so that an instinctive hatred possesses
them. China's curse has been Japan's warning,
and a warning heeded. An opium user in Japan
would be socially a leper.

" The opium law of Japan forbids the importa-
tion, the possession, and the use of the drug, ex-
cept as a medicine ; and it is kept to the letter in
a population of 47,000,000, of whom perhaps
25,000 are Chinese. So rigid are the provisions
of the law that it is sometimes, especially in in-
terior towns, almost impossible to secure opium
or its alkaloids in cases of medical necessity.
• • . The government is determined to keep

British Chickens Home to Roost 169

the opium habit strictly confined to what they
deem to be its legitimate use, which use even,
they seem to think, is dangerous enough to re-
quire special safeguarding.

<< Certain persons are authorized by the head
official of each district to manufacture and pre-
pare opium for medicinal purposes. • • • That
which is up to the required standard (in quality)
is sold to the government : and that which falls
short is destroyed. The accepted opium is sealed
in proper receptacles and sold to a selected num-
ber of wholesale dealers (apothecaries) who in
turn provide physicians and retail dealers with the
drug for medicinal uses only. It can reach the
patient for whose relief it is desired only through
the prescription of the attending ph}rsician. The
records of those who thus use opium in any
of its various forms must be preserved for ten
years.

"The people not merely obey the law, but
they are proud of it; they would not have it
altered if they could. It is the law of the gov-
ernment, but it is the law of the people also.
• . . Apparently, the vigilance of the police is
such that even when opium is successfully smug-
gled in, it cannot be smoked without detection.

lyo Drugging a Nation

The pungent fumes of cooked opium are unmis-
takablei and betray the user almost inevitably.
• . • There is an instance on record where a
couple of Japanese lads in North Formosa ex-
perimented with opium just for a lark; and
though they were guilty only on this occasion,
they were detected, arrested, and punished."

That is what Japan thinks about opium.

The conclusions of this Philippine Commission
formed the basis of the new opium prohibition in
the Philippines, which went into effect March I,
1908. The plan is a modification of the Japanese
system of dealing with the evil.

Australia and New Zealand have also been
forced to face the opium problem. New Zea-
land, by an act of 1901, amended in 1903, pro-
hibits the traffic, and makes offenders liable to a
penalty not exceeding 1^2,500 {£$00) for each
offense. In the Australian Federal Parliament
the question was brought to an issue two or
three years ago. Petitions bearing 200,000 sig-
natures were presented to the parliament, and in
response a law was enacted absolutely prohibit-
ing the importation of opium, except for medic-
inal uses, after January i, 1906. All the state
governments of Australia lose revenue by this

British Chickens Home to Roost 171

prohibition. The voice of the Australian people
was apparently expressed in the Federal Parlia-
ment by Hon. V. L. Solomon^ who said : ** In
the cities of the Southern States anybody going
to the opium dens would see hundreds of appar-
ently respectable Europeans indulging in this
horrible habit. It is a hundredfold more damag-
ing, both physically and morally, than the indul-
gence in alcoholic liquors."

That is what Australia and New Zealand think
about opium.

The attitude of the United States is thus de-
scribed by the Philippine Commission : << It is
not perhaps generally known that in the only
instance where America has made official utter-
ances relative to the use of opium in the East»
she has spoken with no uncertain voice. By
treaty with China in 1880, and again in 1903, no
American bottoms are allowed to carry opium in
Chinese waters. This ... is due to a rec-
ognition that the use of opium is an evil for
which no financial gain can compensate, and
which America will not allow her citizens to en-
courage even passively." By the terms of this
treaty, citizens of the United States are for-
bidden to " import opium into any of the open

172 Drugging a Nation

ports of China, or transport from one open port
to any other open port, or to buy and sell opium
in any of the open ports of China. This abso-
lute prohibition • . . extends to vessels
owned by the citizens or subjects of either
power, to foreign vessels employed by them, or
to vessels owned by the citizens or subjects of
either power and employed by other persons for
the transportation of opium." Thus the United
States is flatly on record as forbidding her citi-
zens to engage, in any way whatever, in the
Chinese opium traffic.

The last item of expert evidence which I shall
present from the countries most deeply con-
cerned in the opium question is from that British
colony, the Transvaal. Were the subject less
grim, it would be difficult to restrain a smile over
this bit of evidence — it is so human, and so hu-
morous. For a century and more, Anglo-Indian
officials have been kept busy explaining that
opium is a heaven-sent blessing to mankind.
It is quite possible that many of them have come
to believe the words they have repeated so often.
Why not ? China was a long way oflf^and India
certainly did need the money. The poor official
had to please the sovereign people back home.

British Chickens Home to Roost 173

one way or another. If a choice between evils
seemed necessary, was he to blame ? We must
try not to be too hard on the government offi-
cial Perhaps opium was good for children.
Keep your blind eye to the telescope and you
can imagine anything you like.

The situation was given its grimly humorous
twist when the monster opium began to invade
regions nearer home. It came into the Trans-
vaal after the Boer War, along with those 70,000
Chinese labourers. The result can only be de-
scribed as an opium panic. I quote, regarding
it, from that '' Memorandum Concerning Indo-
Chinese Opium Trade," which was prepared for
the debate in Parliament during May, 1906:

** The Transvaal offers a striking illustration of
the old proverb as to chickens coming home to
roost.

" On the 6th of September, 1905, Sir George
Farrar moved the adjournment of the Legislative
Council at Pretoria, to call attention to 'the
enormous quantity of opium' finding its way
into the Transvaal. He urged that * measures
should be taken for the immediate stopping of
the traffic' On 6th October, an ordinance was
issued, restricting the importation of opium to

174 I^i'ugging a Nation

registered chemists, only, according to regula-
tions to be prescribed by permits by the lieuten-
ant-governor — under a penalty not exceeding
£SO0 {$2,soo), or imprisonment not exceeding
six months.

*' Any person in possession of such substance
• . . except for medicinal purposes, unless
under a permit, is liable to similar penalties.
Stringent rights of search are given to police,
constables, under certain circumstances, without
even the necessity of a written authority.

** The under-secretary for the colonies has also
stated, ' that the Chinese Labour Importation Or-
dinance, 1904, has been amended to penalize the
possession by, and supply to, Chinese labourers
of opium.' "

Apparently opium is not good for the children
of South Africa. That it would be good (to get
still nearer home) for the children and infants of
Great Britain, is an idea so monstrous, so horri-
ble, that I hardly dare suggest it. No one, I
think, would go so far as to say that the Royal
Commission would have reached those same
extraordinary conclusions had the problem lain
in Great Britain instead of in far-off India and
China. Walk about, of a sunny afternoon, in

British Chickens Home to Roost 175

Kensington Gardens. Watch the ruddy, healthy
children sailing their boats in the Round Pond, or
playing in the. long grass where the sheep are
nibbling, or running merrily along the well-kept
borders of the Serpentine. They are splendid
youngsters, these little Britishers. Their skins
are tanned, their eyes are clear, their little bodies
are compactly knit. Each child has its watchful
nurse. What would the mothers say if His
Majesty's Most Excellent Government should
undertake the manufacture and distribution of
attractive little pills of opium and spices for
these children, and should defend its course not
only on the ground that '* the practice does not
appear to any appreciable extent injurious," but
also on the ground that '' the revenue obtained is
indispensable for carrying on the government
with efficiency " ?

What would these British mothers say ? It is
a fair question. The '< conservative " pro-
opiumist is always ready with an answer to this
question. He claims that it is not fair. He
maintains that the Oriental is difierent from the
Occidental — racially. Opium, he sa}rs, has no
such marked effect on the Chinaman as it has on
the Englishman, no such marked effect on the

176 Drugging a Nation

Chinese infant as it has on the British infont I
have met this '* conservative " pro-opiunust
many times on coasting and river steamers and
in treaty port hotels. I have been one of a
group about a rusty little stove in a German-
kept hostelry where this question was thrashed
out Your '' conservative '' is so cock-sure about
it that he grows, in the heat of his argument,
almost triumphant. At first I thought that per-
haps he might be partially right One man's
meat is occasionally another man's poison. The
Chinese differ from us in so many ways that pos-
sibly they might have a greater capacity to with-
stand the ravages of opium.

It was partly to answer this question that I
went to China. I did not leave China until I
had arrived at an answer that seemed convincing.
If, in presenting the facts in these columns, the
picture I have been painting of China's problem
should verge on the painful, that, I am afraid,
will be the fault of the facts. It is a picture of
the hugest empire in the whole world, fighting a
curse which has all but mastered it, turning for
aid, in sheer despair, to the government, that
has brought it to the edge of ruin. Strange
to say, this British government, as it is to-

British Chickens Home to Roost 177

day constituted, would apparently like to help.
But, across the path of assistance stands, like
a grotesque, inhuman dragon, — the Indian Rev-
enue.

vra

THE POSrnON OF GREAT BRITAIN

AN observant correspondent recently
wrote from Shanghai to a New York
newspaper : ** China has missed catch-
ing fhe fire of the West in the manner of Japan,
and has lain idle and supine while neighbour and
foreigner despoiled her. Her statesmanship
has been languid and irresolute, and her armies
slow and spiritless in the field. Observers who
know China, and are familiar at the same time
with the symptoms of opium, say that it is as if
the listless symptoms of the drug were to be
seen in the very nation itself. Many conclude
that the military and political inertia of the
Chinese is due to the special prevalence of the
opium habit among the two classes of Chinamen
directly responsible: both the soldiers and the
scholars, among whom all the civil and political
posts are held in monopoly, are notoriously ad-
dicted to opium.''

The point which these chapteis should make

Z78

s

I

The Position of Great Britain 179

dear is that opium is the evil thing which is not
only holding China back but is also actually
threatening to bring about the most complete
demoralization and decadence that any large
portion of the world has ever experienced. It is
evident, in this day of extended trade interests,
that such a paralysis of the hugest and the most
industrious of the great races would amount to
a world-disaster. Already the United States is
suflering from the weakness of the Chinese gov-
ernment in Manchuria, which permits Japan to
control in the Manchurian province and to dis-
criminate against American trade. This dis-
crimination would appear to have been one
strong reason for the sailing of the battleship
fleet to the Pacific. If this relatively small result
of China's weakness and inertia can arouse great
nations and can play a part in the moving of
great fleets, it is not difficult to imagine the
world-importance of a complete breakdown.
Every great Western nation has a trade or ter-
ritorial footing in China to defend and maintain.
Every great Western nation is watching the com-
plicated Chinese situation with sleepless eyes.
Such a breakdown might quite possibly mean
the unconditional surrender of China's destiny

i8o Dnigging a Nation

into the hands of Japan; which, with Japan's
growing desire to dominate the Pacific, and with
it the world, might quite possibly mean the rapid
approach of the great international conflict.

We have seen, in the course of these chapters,
that China appears to be almost completely in
the grasp of her master-vice. The opium curse
in China is a dreadful example of the economic
waste of eviL It has not only lowered the vi-
tality, and therefore the efficiency of men, women,
and children in all walks of life, but it has also
crowded the healthier crops off the land, usurped
no small part of the industrial life, turned the
balance of trade against China, plunged her into
wars, loaded her with indemnity charges, taken
away part of her territory, and made her the
plundering ground of the nations. She has been
compelled to look indolently on while Japan,
alight with the fire of progress, has raised her
brown head proudly among the peoples of the
West. So China has at last been driven to make
a desperate stand against the encroachments of
the curse, which is wrecking her. The fight is
on to-day. It is plain that China is sincere ; she
must be sincere, because her only hope lies in
conquering opium. She has turned for help to

The Position of Grreat Britain 181

Great Britain, for Britain's Indian government
developed the opium trade (''for purposes of
foreign commerce only ") and continues to-day
to pour a flood of the drug into the channels of
Chinese trade. Once China thought to crowd
out the Indian product by producing the drug
herself, as a preliminary to controlling the traffic,
but she has never been able to develop a grade
of opium that can compete with the brown paste
from the Ganges Valley.

This summing up brings us to a consideration
of two questions which must be considered sooner
or later by the people of the civilized worid :

1. Can China hope to conquer the opium
curse without the help of Great Britain ?

2. What is Great Britain doing to help her ?
In attempting to work out the answer to these

questions, we must think of them simply as prac-
tical problems bearing on the trade, the territorial
development, and the military and naval power
of the nations. We must try for the present to
ignore the mere moral and ethical suggestions
which the questions arouse.

First, then : can China, single-handed, possibly
succeed in this fight, now going on, against the
slow paralysis of opium ?

l82

Druggbg a Nation

^i

is not a nation in the sense in which we
ordinarily use the word (if we picture to our-
selves the countries of Europe, with their differ-
ent languages and different customs drawn to-
gether into a loose confederation under the gov-
ernment of a conquering race, we shall have
some small conception of what this Chinese
« nation " really is^The peoples of these differ-
ent European countries are all Caucasians ; the
difierent peoples of China are all Mongolians.
These Chinese people speak eighteen or twenty
'< languages/' each divided into almost innumei^
able dialects and sub-dialects. They are gov-
erned by Manchu, or Tartar, conquerors who
spring from a difierent stock, wear different cos-
tumes, and speak, among themselves, a language
wholly different from any of the eighteen or
twenty native tongues.

In making this diversity clear, it is necessary
only to cite a few illustrations. There is not
even a standard of currency in China. Each
province or group of provinces has its own
standard tael, differing grpatly in value from
the tael which may be the basis of value in
the next province or group. There is no gov-
ernment coinage whatever. All the mints are

The Position of Great Britain 183

privately owned and are run for profit in supply-
ing the local demand for currency, and the basis
of this currency is the Mexican dollar, a foreign
unit. They make dollar bills in Honan Province.
I went into Chili Province and offered some of
these Honan bills in exchange for purchases.
The merchants merely looked at them and shook
their heads. ** Tientsin dollar have got ? " was
the question. So the money of a community or
a province is simply a local commodity and has
either a lower value or no value elsewhere, for
the simple reason that the average Chinaman
knows only his local money and will accept no
other. The diversity of language is as easily ob-
served as the diversity of coinage. On the
wharves at Shanghai you can hear a Canton
Chinaman and a Shanghai Chinaman talking to-
gether in pidgin English, their only means of
communication. When I was travelling in the
Northwest, I was accosted in French one day by
a Chinese station-agent, on the Shansi Railroad,
who frankly said that he was led to speak to me,
a foreigner, by the fact that he was a <' foreigner "
too. With his blue gowii and his black pigtail,
he looked to me no different from the other na-
tives ; but he told me that he found the language

184 Drugging z Nation

and customs of Shansi '< difficult/' and that he
sometimes grew homesick for his native city in
the South.

That the Chinese of different provinces really
regard one another as foreigners may be illustra-
ted by the fact that, during the Boxer troubles
about Tientsin, it was a common occurrence for
the northern soldiers to shoot down indiscrimi-
nately with the white men any Cantonese who
appeared within rifle-shot

This diversity, probably a result of the cost
and difficulty of travel, is a factor in the immense
inertia which hinders all progress in China.
People who differ in coinage, language, and cus-
toms, who have never been taught to ** think im-
perially" or in terms other than those of the
village or city, cannot easily be led into cooper-
ation on a large scale. It is difficult enough.
Heaven knows, to effect any real change in the
government of an American city or state, or of
the nation, let alone effecting any real changes in
the habits of men. Witness our own struggle
against graft Witness also the vast struggle
against the liquor traffic now going on in a score
of our states. Even in this land of ours, which
is so new that there has hardly been time to

The Position of Great Britain 185

form traditions ; which is alert to the value of
changes and quick to leap in the direction of
progress ; which is essentially homogeneous in
structure, with but one language, innumerable
daily newspapers, and a close network of fast,
comfortable railway trains to keep the various
communities in touch with the prevailing idea of
the moment, how easy do we find it to wipe out
race-track gambling, say, or to make our insur-
ance laws really effective, or to check the corrupt
practices of corporations, or to establish the
principle of local municipal ownership ? To put
it in still another light, how easy do we find it
to bring about a change which the great majority
of us agree would be for the better, such as mak-
ing over the costly, cumbersome express busi-
ness into a government parcels post ?

But there are large money interests which
would suffer by such reforms, you say ? True ;
and there are large money interests suffering by
the opium reforms in China, relatively as large
as any money interests we have in this country.
The opium reforms affect the large and the small
farmers, the manufacturers, the transportation
companies, the bankers, the commission men,
the hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers, and

l86 Drugging a Nation

the government revenues, for the opium traffic is
an aknost inextricable strand in the fabric of
Chinese commerce. In addition to these bewil-
dering complications of the problem, there is the
discouraging inertia to overcome of a land which,
far from being alert and active, is sunk in the
lethargy of ancient local custom.

No, in putting down her master-vice, China
must not only overcome all the familiar economic
difficulties that tend to block reform everywhere,
but, in addition, must find a way to rouse and
energize the most backward and (outside of the
age-old grooves of conduct and government) the
most unmanageable empire in the world.

On what element in her population must
China rely to put this huge reform into effect ?
On the officials, or mandarins, who carry out the
governmental edicts in every province, adminis-
ter Chinese justice, and control the military and
finances. But of these officials, more than
ninety per cent, have been known to be opium-
smokers, and fully fifty per cent, have been
financially interested in the trade.

Still another obstacle blocking reform is the
powerful example and widespread influence of
the treaty ports. Perhaps the white race is

The Position of Great Britain 187

<< superior" to the yellow; I shall not dispute
that ^notion here. But one fact which I know
personally is that every one of the treaty ports,
where the white men rule, including the British
crown colony of Hongkong, chose last year to
maintain its opium revenue regardless of the
protests of the Chinese officials.

Putting down opium in China would appear
to be a pretty big job. The " vested interests,"
yellow and white, are against a change; the
personal habits of the officials themselves work
against it ; the British keep on pouring in their
Indian opium; and by way of a positive force
on the affirmative side of the question there
would appear to be only the lethargy and im-
potence of a decadent, chaotic race. How would
you like to tackle a problem of this magnitude,
as Yuan Shi K'ai and Tong Shao-i have done ?
Try to organize a campaign in your home town
against the bill-board nuisance ; against corrupt
politics; against drink or cigarettes. Would it
be easy to succeed ? When you have thought
over some of the difficulties that would block
you on every hand, multiply them by fifty
thousand and then take off your hat to Tong
Shao-i and Yuan Shi K'ai. Personally, I think

i88 Drugging a Nation

I should prefer undertaking to stamp out drink
in Europe. I should know, of course, that it
would be rather a difficult business, but still it
would be easier than this Chinese proposition.

So much for the difficulties of the problem.
Suppose now we take a look at the results of the
first year of the fight. There are no exact
statistics to be had, but based as it is on personal
travel and observation, on reports of travelling
officials, merchants, missionaries, and of other
journalists who have been in regions which I did
not reach, I think my estimate should be fairly
accurate. Remember, this is a fight to a finish.
If the Chinese government loses, opium will win.

The plan of the government, let me repeat, is
briefly as follow$ : First, the area under poppy
cultivation is to be decreased about ten per cent,
each year, until that cultivation ceases alto-
gether; and simultaneously the British govern-
ment is to be requested to decrease the exporta-
tion of opium from India ten per cent, each
year. Second, all opium dens or places where
couches or lamps are supplied for public smok-
ing are to be closed at once under penalty of
confiscation. Third, all persons who purchase
opium at sale shops are to be registered, and the

M

The Position of Great Britain 189

amount supplied to them to be diminished from
month to month. Meantime, the farmer is to be
given all possible advice and aid in the matter of
substituting some other crop for the poppy;
opium cures and hospitals are to be established
as widely as possible; and preachers and lecturers
are to be sent out to explain the dangers of
opium to the illiterate millions.

The central government at Peking started in
by giving the high officials six months in which
to change their habits. At the end of that
period a large number were suspended from
office, including Prince Chuau and Prince Jui»

In one opium province, Shansi, we have seen
that the enforcement was at the start effective.
The evidence, gathered with some difficulty from
residents and travellers, from roadside gossip, and
from talks with officials, all went to show that the
dens in all the leading cities were closed, that the
manufacturers of opium and its accessories were
going out of business, and that the farmers were
beginning to limit their crops.

The enforcements in the adjoining province,
Chih-li, in which lies Peking, was also thoroughly
effective at the start. The opium dens in all
the large cities were closed during the spring,

IQO Drugging a Nation

and the restaurants and disorderly houses which
had formerly served opium to their customers
surrendered their lamps and implements.
Throughout the other provinces north of the
Yangtse River, while there was evidence of a
fairly consistent attempt to enforce the new
regulations, the results were not altogether satis-
fying. Along the central and southern coast,
from Shanghai to Canton, the enforcement was
effective in about half the important centers of
population. In Canton, or Kwangtung Province,
the prohibition was practically complete.

The real test of the prohibition movement is
to come in the great interior provinces of the
South, Yunnan and Kweichou, and in the huge
western province of Sze-chuan. It is in these
regions that opium has had its strongest grip on
the people, and where the financial and agricul-
tural phases of the problems are most acute. All
observers recognized that it was unfair to expect
immediate and complete prohibition in these
regions, where opium-growing is quite as grave
a question as opium-smoking. The beginning
of the enforcement in Sze-chuan seems to have
been cautious but sincere. In this one province
the share of the imperial tax on opium alone.

The Position of Great Britain 191

over and above local needs, amounts to more
than $2,000,000 (gold), and, thanks to the con-
stant demands of the foreign powers for their
" indemnity " money, the imperial government
is hardly in a position to forego its demands on
the provinces. But recognizing that a new reve-
nue must be built up to supplant the old, the
three new opium commissioners of Sze-chuan
have begun by preparing addresses explaining
the evils of opium, and sending out " public ora-
tors " to deliver them to the people. They have
also used the local newspapers extensively for
their educational work; and they have sent out
the provincial police to make lists of all opium-
smokers, post their names on the outside of their
houses, and make certain that they will be de-
barred from all public employment and from
posts of honour. The chief commissioner, Tso,
declares that he will clear Chen-tu, the provincial
capital, a city of 400,000 inhabitants, of opium
within four years; and no one seems to doubt
that he will do it as effectively as he has cleared
the streets of the beggars for which Chen-tu was
formerly notorious. When Mr. J. G. Alexander,
of the British Anti-Opium Society, was in Chen-tu
last year, this same Commissioner Tso called a

192 Dragging a Nation

maBS-meetiiig for him, at^diidi tiie native oflSdals
and gentry sat on the platform witii representa-
tives of the missionary societies, and ten tiiou-
sand Chinese crowded about to hear Mr. Alex-
ander's address.

The most disappointing region in the matter
of the opium prohibition is the upper Yangtse
Valley. In the lower valley, from Nanking
down to Soochow and Shanghai (native city),
the enforcement ranges from partial to complete.
But in the upper valley, from Nanking to Han-
kow and above, I could not find the slightest
evidence of enforcement. At the river ports the
dens were running openly, many of them with
doors opening directly off the street and with
smokers visible on the couches within. The
viceroy of the upper Yangtse provinces, Chang-
chi-tung, " the Great Viceroy," has been recog-
nized for a generation as one of China's most
advanced thinkers and reformers. His book,
<' China's Only Hope," has been translated into
many languages, and is recognized as the most
eloquent analysis of China's problems ever made
by Chinese or Manchu. In it he is flatly on
record against opium. Indeed, when governor
of Shansi, twenty odd years ago, this same offi-

The Position of Great Britain 193

cial sent out his soldiers to beat down the poppy
crop. Yet it was in this viceroyalty alone,
among all the larger subdivisions of China, that
there was no evidence whatever last year of an
intention to enforce the anti- opium edicts. The
only explanation of this state of things seems to
be that Chang-chi-tung is now a very old man,
and that to a great extent he has lost his vigour
and his grip on his work. Whatever the reason,
this fact has been used with telling effect in pro-
opium arguments in the British Parliament as an
illustration of China's ** insincerity."

The situation seems to sum up about as fol-
lows : The prohibition of opium was immedi-
ately effective over about one-quarter of China,
and partially effective over about two-thirds.
This, it has seemed to me, considering the diffi-
culty and immensity of the problem, is an extra-
ordinary record. Every opium den actually
closed in China represents a victory. Whether
the dens will stay closed, after the first frenzy
of reform has passed, or whether the prohibition
movement will gain in strength and effectiveness,
time alone will tell. But there is an ancient pop-
ular saying in China to this effect, " Do not fear
to go slowly ; fear to stop."

194 Dragging a Nation

We have seen, then, that while the Chinese are
fighting the opium evil earnestlyi and in part ef-
fectively, they are still some little way short of
conquering it. Also, we must not forget, that all
reforms are strongest in their beginnings. The
Chinese, no less than the rest of us, will take up
a moral issue in a burst of enthusiasm. But
human beings cannot continue indefinitely in a
bursting condition. Reaction must always follow
extraordinary exertion, and it is then that the
habits of life regain their ascendency. Remark-
able as this reform battle has been in its results,
it certainly cannot show a complete, or even a
half-complete, victory over the brown drug.
And meantime the government of British India
is pouring four-fifths of its immense opium pro-
duction into China by way of Hongkong and the
treaty ports. It should be added, further, that
while the various self-governing ports, excepting
Shanghai, have very recently been forced, one by
one, to cover up at least the appearance of evil,
the crown colony of Hongkong, which is under
the direct rule of Great Britain, is still clinging
doggedly to its opium revenues. The whole
miserable business was summed up thus in a
recent speech in the House of Commons;

The Position of Great Britain 195

*'The mischief is in China; the money is in
India."

What is Great Britain doing to help China ?
His Majesty's government has indulged in a reso-
lution now and then, has expressed diplomatic
"sympathy" with its yellow victims, and has
even *< urged " India in the matter, but is it really
doing anything to help ?

There are reasons why the world has a right
to ask this question.

If China is to grow weaker, she must ulti-
mately submit to conquest by foreign powers.
There are nine or ten of these powers which have
some sort of a footing in China. No one of
them trusts any one of the others, therefore each
must be prepared to fight in defense of its own
interests. It is not safe to tempt great commer-
cial nations with a prize so rich as China ; they
might yield. Once this conquest, this "parti-
tion," sets in, there can result nothing but chaos
and world-wide trouble.

The trend of events is to-day in the direction of
this world-wide trouble. The only apparent way
to head it off is to begin strengthening China to
a point where she can defend herself against con-
quest. The first step in this strengthening proc-

196 Drugging a Nation

ess is the putting down of opium — there is no
other first step. Before you can put down
opium, you have got to stop opium production
in India. And therefore the Anglo-Indian
opium business is not England's business, but
the world's business. The world is to-day pay-
ing the cost of this highly expensive luxury
along with China. Every sallow morphine vic-
tim on the streets of San Francisco, Chicago,
and New York is helping to pay for this govern-
ment traffic in vice.

But is Great Britain planning to help China?

The government of the British empire is at
present in the hands of the Liberal party, which
has within it a strong reform element. From the
Tory party nothing could be expected; it has
always worshipped the Things that Are, and it
has always defended the opium traffic. If either
party is to work this change, it must be that one
which now holds the reins of power. And yet,
after generations of fighting against the govern-
ment opium industry on the part of all the reform
organizations in England, after Parliament has
twice been driven to vote a resolution condemn-
ing the traffic, after generations of statesmen,
from Palmerston through Gladstone to John

The Position of Great Britain 197

Motley, have held out assurances of a change,
after the Chinese government, tired of waiting on
England, has begun the struggle, this is the final
concession on England's part :

The British government has agreed to decrease
the exportation of Indian opium about eight per
cent, per year during a trial period of three years,
in order to see whether the cultivation of the
poppy and the number of opium-smokers is les-
sened. Should such be the case, exportation to
China will be further decreased gradually.

The reader will observe here some very pretty
diplomatic juggling. There is here none of the
spirit which animated the United States last year
in proposing voluntarily to give up a consider-
able part of its indemnity money. The British
government is yielding to a tremendous popular
clamour at home ; but nothing more. Could a
government offer less by way of carrying out the
conviction of a national parliament to the effect
that ** the methods by which our Indian opium
revenues are derived are morally indefensible " ?
The English people are urging their government,
the Chinese are diplomatically putting on pres-
sure, the United States is organizing an interna-
tional opium commission on the ground that the

198 Drugging a Nation

nations which consume Indian and Chinese
opium have, willy-nilly, a finger in the pie.
And by way of response to this pressure the
British government agrees to lessen very slightly
its export for a few years, or until the pressure is
removed and the trade can slip back to normal I

There are not even assurances that the agree-
ment will be carried out. While this very agita-
tion has been going on, since these chapters
began to appear in Success Magazine^ the an-
nual export of Bengal opium has increased
(1906-1908) from 96,688 chests to 101,588
chests. And it is well to remember that after
Mr. Gladstone, as prime minister, had given as-
surances of a " great reduction " in the traffic, the
officials of India admitted that they had not heard
of any such reduction.

A few months ago, the Government issued a
"White Paper" containing the correspondence
with China on the opium question, so that there
is no dependence on hearsay in this arraignment
of the British attitude. Let us glance at an ex-
cerpt or two from these official British letters.
This, for example :

"The Chinese proposal, on the other hand,
which involves extinction of the import in nine

The Position of Great Britain 199

years, would commit India irrevocably, and in
advance of experience, to the complete suppres-
sion of an important trade, and goes beyond the
underlying condition of the scheme, that restric-
tion of import from abroad, and reduction of pro-
duction in China, shall be brought pari passu into
play."

Not content with this rather sordid expression.
His Majesty's Government goes on to point out
that, under existing treaties, China cannot refuse
to admit Indian opium ; that China cannot even
increase the import duty on Indian opium with-
out the permission of Great Britain ; that before
Great Britain will consider the question of per-
manently reducing her production China must
prove that the number of her smokers has dimin-
ished ; that the opium traffic is to be continued
at least for another ten years ; and then indulges
in this superb deliverance ;

The proposed limitation of the export to
60,000 chests from 1908 is thought to be a very
substantial reduction on this figure, and the view
of the Government of India is that such a standard
ought to satisfy the Chinese Government for the
present.

Even by their own estimate, after taking out

loo Drugging a Nation

the proposed total decrease of 15,300 chests in
the Chinese trade, the Indian Government will,
during the next three years, unload more than
170,000 chests of opium on a race which it has
brought to degradation, which is to-day strug-
gling to overcome demoralization, and which is
appealing to England and to the whole civilized
world for aid in the unequal contest.

We must try to be fair to the gentlemen*offi-
cials who see the situation only in this curious
half-light ** It is a practical question/' they say.
'' The law of trade is the balance-sheet. It is not
our fault as individuals that opium, the com-
modity, was launched out into the channels of
trade ; but since it is now in those channels, the
law of trade must rule, the balance-sheet must
balance. Opium means $20fxx>fxx> a year to
the Indian Government — we cannot give it up."

The real question would seem to be whether
they can afford to continue receiving this
revenue. Opium does not appear to be a very
valuable commodity in India itself. Just as in
China, it degrades the people. The profits in
production, for everybody but the government,
are so small that the strong hand of the law has
often, nowadays, to be exerted in order to keep

^-1

The Position of Great Britain 201

the ryots (farmers) at the task of raising the
poppy. There are many thoughtful observers of
conditions in India who believe it would be
highly " practical " to devote the rich soil of the
Ganges Valley to crops which have a sound
economic value to the world.

But more than this, the opium programme saps
India as it saps China. The position of the
Englishman in India to-day is by no means so
secure that he can aiford to indulge in bad
government. The spirit of democracy and
socialism has already spread through Europe
and has entered Asia. In Japan, trade-unions
are striking for higher wages. In China and
India, are already heard the mutterings of revolu-
tion. The British government may yet have to
settle up, in India as weU as in China, for its
opium policy. And when the day for settling up
comes, it may perhaps be found that a higher
balance-sheet than that which rules the govern-
ment opium industry may force Great Britain to
pay — and pay dear.

Yes, the world has some right to make de-
mands of England in this matter. China can make
no real progress in its struggle until the Indian
production and exportation are flatly abolished.

f"

202 Drugging a Nation

The situation has distinctly not grown better
since the magazine publication of the first of
these chapters, a year ago. If the reader would
like to have an idea of where Great Britain
stands to-day on the opium business, he can do
no better than to read the following excerpts
from a speech made last spring by the Hon.
Theodore C. Taylor, M. P., on his return from a
journey round the world, undertaken for the pur-
pose of personally investigating the opium problem.

First, this :

<< We shall not begin to have the slightest right
to ask that China should give proof of her
genuineness about reform until we show more
proof of our own genuineness about reform, and
until we suppress the opium traffic where we
can. China has taken this difficult reform in
hand. She has done much, but not everything.
In Shanghai, Hongkong, and the Straits, we
have done nothing at all. I want to say this
morning, as pricking the bubble of our own
Pharisaism, that from the point of view of re-
form, the blackest opium spots in China are the
spots under British rule."

And then, in conclusion, this :

''I am convinced, and deeply convinced, as

The Position of Great Britain 203

every observant and thoughtful man is that knows
anything of China, that China is a great coming
power. I was talking to a fellow member of the
House of Commons who lately went to China,
and went into barracks and camps with the
Chinese, and who made it his business to study
Chinese military affairs, which generally excite
so much laughter outside China. He spent a
good deal of time with the Chinese soldier. He
said to me, as many other people have said to
me, ' The Chinaman is splendid raw material as
a soldier, and, if his officers would properly lead
the Chinaman, he would follow and make the
finest soldier in the world, bar none.' It will
take China a long, long time to organize heiself ;
it will take her a long time to organize her army
and navy ; it will take a long time to get rid of
the system of bribery in China, which is one of
the hindrances to putting down the opium
traffic ; but, depend upon it, the time is coming,
not perhaps very soon, but by and by — and nations
have long memories — when those who are alive
to see the development of China will be very glad
that, when China was weak and we were strong, we,
of our own motion, without being made to, helped
China to get away from this terrible curse/'

Appendix — A Letter from the Field

THE OPIUM CLIMAX IN SHANGHAI

Editor " Success Magazine " ;

It is fitting that in the columns of Success^
2l magazine which has so recently investigated and
so thoroughly and ably reported upon the opium
curse in China, there should appear the account of a
unique ceremony held in the International Settlement
of Shanghai, illustrating in a striking manner the
general feeling of the Chinese towards the anti-opium
movement and setting an example that will make its
influence felt in the most remote provinces of the
empire. In response to liberal advertising there
assembled in the spacious grounds of Chang Su Ho's
Gardens, on the afternoon of Sunday, May 3, 1908,
some two or three thousand of Shanghai's leading
Chinese business men, together with a goodly sprink-
ling of Europeans and Americans, to witness the
destruction of the opium-pipes, lamps, etc., taken
from the Nan Sun Zin Opium Palace. In America,
such a scene as this would have appeared little less
than a farce, but here the obvious earnestness of the
Chinese, the great value of the property to be des-
troyed and the deep meaning of this sacrifice, should
have been sufficient to put the blush of shame upon
the cheeks of the Shanghai voters and councilmen,

204

Appendix 205

whO| representing the most enlightened nations of the
earth, have compromised with the opium evil and
permitted three-fourths of this nefarious business to
linger in the << Model Settlement " when it has been
so summarily dealt with by the native authorities
throughout the land.

Within a roped-in, circular enclosure, marked by
two large, yellow Dragon-Flags, were stacked the
furnishings of the Opium Palace, consisting of opium
boxes, pipes, lamps, tables, trays, etc., and as the
spectators arrived the work of destruction was going
rapidly on. Two native blacksmiths were busily en-
gaged in splitting on an anvil the metal fittings from
the pipes, and a brawny coolie, armed with a sledge-
hammer, was driving flat the artistic opium lamps as
they were taken from the tables and placed on the
ground before him. Meanwhile the pipes, mellowed
and blackened by long use and many of them show-
ing rare workmanship, were dipped into a large tin of
kerosine and stacked in two piles on stone bases, to
form the funeral pyre, while the center of each stack
was filled in with kindling from the opium trays,
similarly soaked with oil. On one of the tables within
the enclosure were two small trays, each containing a
complete smoking outfit and a written sheet of paper
announcing that these were the offerings of Mr. Lien
Yue Ming, manager of the East Asiatic Dispensary,
and Miss Kua Kuei Yen, a singing girl, respectively.
Both these quondam smokers sent in their apparatus
to be burned, with a pledge that henceforth they
would abstain from the use of the drug.

During the preparations for the burning, Mr. Sun

2o6 Appendix

Ching Foong, a prominent business man, deliyered a
powerful exhortation on the opium evil to the en-
thusiastic multitude and introduced the leading
speaker of the afternoon^ Mr. Wong Ching Foo,
representing the Committee of the Commercial Bazaar.
Mr. Wong spoke in the Mandarin language and stated
that all of China was looking to Shanghai for a lead in
the matter of suppressing opium and that it was with
great pleasure the committee had noticed the earnest de-
sire of the foreign Municipal Council (and he was not
intending to be sarcastic f) to assist the Chinese in their
endeavour to do away entirely with this traffic. It
was a very commendable effort, and he was sure the
foreigners there would agree that no effort on their
part could be too strong to do away with this curse,
which was not only undermining the best intellects of
China, but by the example of parents was affecting
seriously the rising generation. To-day a gentleman,
who had been a smoker for twenty-nine years and had
realized the great harm it had done him, was present,
and had brought with him his opium utensils to be
destroyed with those from the opium saloons of
French-town. The Nan Sun Zin Opium Palace, from
which the pipes and other opium utensils had been
brought for destruction, was the largest in Shanghai
and, he had heard, the largest in China, patronized
by the most notable people. The example of Shang-
hai was felt in Nanking, Peking, and all over China,
for the young men who visited here took with them
the report of the pleasures they saw practiced in this
settlement and thus gave the natives different ideas.
These young men often came here to see the wondei^

Appendix 207

ful work accomplished by foreigners, and it was not
right that they should take this curse back with them.
It had been originally intended to bum also the chairs
and tables from the palace, but as this would make
too large and dangerous a fire it had been decided to
sell these and use the proceeds for the furtherance of
the anti-opium movement.

Among the pipes were some for which I500 had
been offered, but the Committee of the Commercial
Bazaar had purchased the whole outfit to destroy, and
they hoped to be able to buy up a good many more of
the palaces and thus utterly destroy all traces of the
opium-smoking practice. Mr. Wong remarked that
China had recently been under a cloud and in Shang-
hai there had been protracted rains, but to-day it was
fine and it was evident that heaven was looking down
upon them and blessing their efforts. With heaven's
blessing they would be able to ov^come the curse and
be even quicker than the Municipal Council in com-
pletely wiping out this abominable custom.

As the speeches were concluded, the Chinese
Volunteer Band struck up a lively air and amid the
deafening din of crackers and bombs a torch was ap-
plied to the oil-soaked stacks of pipes which at once
burned up fiercely. Extra oil was thrown upon the
flames and the glass lamp-covers, bowls, etc., were
heaped upon the flames, thus completing a ceremony
full of earnestness and meaning.

It has come as a matter of great surprise to many
sceptical foreigners that the Chinese should be making
such strenuous efforts to do away with the opium-
smoking curse. Not a few have thrown cold water

2o8 Appendix

upon the scheme, sneered at the Chinese in Ibis
deavouri and doubted both their desire and ability to
suppress the sale of opium. The Conmiercial Bazaar
Committee, consisting of well-known Chinese business
men, is not only seconding the Municipal Councfl in
its gradual withdrawal of licenses in the foreign settle-
ments but has also accomplished the closing of many
opium dens through its own efforts by bringing pies-
sure to bear upon the owners of the dens. Already,
many private individuals have given up their bdoved
pipes and some dens have voluntarily closed. It has
also been agreed by the Chinese concerned that all of
the shops run by women are to cease the sale of opium.
This activity on the part of the Chinese themselves is
a striking rebuke to those who cast suspicion upon the
honesty of purpose of both the Chinese government
and peopleirefusing to immediately abolish the opium
licenses in the foreign settlements of Shanghai, despte
the appeals from the American, British, and Japanese
governments, the petitions of the leading Chinese of the
place and the general popularity of the anti-opium
movement. Yielding to great pressure from all sides,
the Shanghai Municipal Council did consent to intro-
duce a resolution upon this question before the Rate-
payers Meeting to be held March 20th, but the con-
cession made was small indeed compared with what
was generally desired or what might be anticipated
from the leading lights of '< civilized and lughly
moral '' nations. The resolution was as follows : —

"jResoiuhon VL That the number of licensed
opium houses be reduced by one-quarter from July x,
X908, or from such other early date and in such man*

Appendix 209

nor as may appear advisable to the Council for 190S-
1909.**

While there was in this a definite reduction of one-
fourth of the opium-joints in the settlement, there was
nothing definite as to any future policy, though the
implication was that the houses would be all closed
within a period of two years. In his speech introduc-
ing this resolution before the ratepayers, the British
chairman of the council said, among other things,
*' I feel sure that every one of us has the greatest sym-
pathy with the Chinese nation in its effort to dissipate
the opium habit, but we are not unfamiliar with
Chinese official procedure, and how far short actual
administrative results fall when compared with the
official pronouncements that precede them. It is im-
possible not to be sceptical as to the intentions of the
Chinese government with regard to this matter, al-
though on this occasion we quite recognize that many
o^BciaLs are sincere in their desire to eradicate the
opium evil, and I am sure there is every intention on
the part of this community to assist them. Yet we
know of no programme that they have drawn up to
make this great reform possible, if indeed they have a
programme. . . . The absence of these, so to
speak, first business essentials, on the part of the
Chinese government, was among the reasons which led
us to the view that the settlement was called upon to
do litde more than continue its work of supervision
over opium licenses, and wait for the cessation of sup-
plies of the drug to render that supervision unneces-
sary. , . . The advice we have received from
the British Government is, in brief, that we should do

210 Appendix

more than keep pace with the native authorities, we
should be in advance of them and where possible en-
courage them to follow us."

In the following quotations from a letter written by
Dr. DuBose, of Soochow, President of the Anti-Opium
League, to the municipal council, the attitude of the
reformers k clearly shown.

** The prohibition of opium-smoking is the greatest
reformation the world has ever seen, and its benefits
are already patent. Let the ratepayers effectually
second the efforts being made by the Chinese govern-
ment to abolish the use of opium throughout the empire.

''It has proved a peaceful reformation. In the
cities and towns about one-half million dens, at the
expiration of six months, were closed promptly with-
out resistance or complaint. The government will
grant all the necessary privileges of inspection to the
municipal police in the prevention of illicit smoking.

"The consumption of opium in the cities has
fallen off thirty per cent. ; in the towns fifty per cent. ;
while in the rural districts in the eastern and middle
provinces it is reduced to a minimum. It is well for
Shanghai to be allied with Soochow, Hangchow, and
Nanking, and not to permit itself to be a refuge for
bad men.

"The Chinese merchants in the International
Settlement have sent in earnest appeals to the Council
on this question. As friends of China, might not the
ratepayers give their appeals a courteous considera-
tion?

" The question of opium at the Annual Meeting
commands world-wide attention and Saturday's papers

i

Appendix 2 i i

throughout Christendom will bear record of and com-
ment upon the action.

" To close the dens is right. Shanghai cannot
afford to be the black spot on Kiangsu's map. Opium
deUndum est.

*' In behalf of the Anti-Opium League^

** Hampden C. DuBose, Presideta:^

The appeals from Great Britain^ America, Chinay and
Japan, like the petitions of merchants, missionaries,
and officials, were without effect. The ''vested in-
terests " carried the day, and a resolution, ordering
the closing of the dens on or before the end of
December, 1909, was lost by a vote of 128 to 189, the
council, as usual, influencing and controlling the votes
and carrying the original motion — the only concession
it would grant to this gigantic movement.

Another surprise came to the cynical foreigner,
when, on April 18th, the whole of the opium licensees
participated in a public drawing in the town hall, to
decide by lottery which establishments should be shut
down on the ist of July, numbering one-fourth of the
total number, this method being adopted by the
council to avoid any suspicion of partiality in the
selection. The keepers of the dens cheerfully
acquiesced in the proposal, the sporting chance no
doubt appealing to the gambling spirit for which they
are noted, and in the town hall this remarkable
drawing was held without any sign of disfavour or
rowdyism. The keepers of the Shanghai opium shops
are no doubt thoroughly convinced that the feeling of
the native community is entirely against the retention

212 Appendix

of these places and are ready to bowto the inevitatde.
None of the trouble or rioting feared bj the Council,
materializedy and it is certain that the entire list of
licenses might have been immediatdj revoked without
disturbance of any kind — and without protest. Three
hundred and fifty-nine licenses thus cease with the
end of June, and it is doubtf ul^ with the present spirit
manifest in the Chinese^ that such another drawing
will be necessary at alL The funeral pyre of opium-
pipes, we trust, marks the end, or the immediate begin-
ning of the end, of Shanghai's reproach, and it is
distinctly to the credit of the 500,000 Chinese living
within the jurisdiction of this foreign community, that
they themselves are taking the lead in wiping out
this stain on the ** Model Settlement " — doing what
the foreigner dc^ed not and the ''vested interest "
would not do.

Charlxs F. Gammon.

MISSIONARY— TRAVELS

The Call of Korea

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Tklit^c K<%fl^Aft A Collection of Sketches and Anecdotes,
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with Introductory Biogniphlctl SbBtch by Bflnry N.Cobb J>J>.
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